MIDF said they were in Sydney on a working trip led by Gamuda, where they visited sites related to the group’s maiden and largest project in Australia, the Western Tunnelling Package for the Sydney Metro West (SMW-WTP). According to the analysts, Gamuda has made great progress from the observations and this further strengthens views of the group’s growth
alongside the positive prospects in Australia.
Among the sites visited were the Parramatta metro station site, Rosehill Services Facility and the Eastern Creek Precast Facility. To recap, the size of the SMW-WTP is about AUD2.57b (RM7.7b), including RM1.2b of variation orders and the current completion progress is at 39%. Gamuda Australia and its consortium partner Laing O’Rourke was awarded the project by the New South Wales (NSW) Government in Mar-22. The job scope includes 9km of twin, metro rail tunnel between Westmead and Sydney Olympic Park; excavation and civil works for new metro stations in the Parramatta CBD and Westmead Health Precinct; earthworks, civil structures, utilities and connecting tunnels for a maintenance and stabling facility at Clyde; and excavation and underground structures for the Services Facility at Rosehill. Parramatta metro station. Upcoming work at Parramatta includes constructing the D-wall perimeter, excavation and steel struts of the future station box, and nozzle construction for the entrance to the tunnel boring machine (TBM) tunnels and construction of the twin metro TBM tunnels (mid 2024-2025).
Both TBMs made history in Australia as the first autonomous TBMs to be used in the country. Both machines will feature AI software developed by Gamuda that will automatically steer, operate and monitor various TBM functions. A little fun fact, TBM Betty was named after four-time Olympic champion Betty Cuthbert while TBM Dorothy was named after Australian human rights activist Dorothy Buckland-Fuller. The autonomous TBMs will tunnel 4.5km towards the Sydney Olympic Park where they will then be retrieved and return to Rosehill to be relaunched and to build another 4.5km metro tunnels to Westmead via the new Parramatta Station.
The final site visit was to the precast facility at Eastern Creek, which is used to manufacture concrete segments needed to line the twin tunnels for the SMW-WTP. Each ring around the tunnel are formed by six segments. They are loaded into the TBM and as the machine excavates a section of tunnel, it lifts six segments onto the tunnel’s circular wall to form a ring, which are designed to fit together to create a waterproof permanent lining. Grout is then pumped around the segments to secure them into place. About 85 to 90 concrete segments are produced daily, each weighing about 3.8 tonnes.
The facility operates round the clock the entire week. About 60,000 concrete segments are needed to fully line the metro twin tunnels between Sydney Olympic Park and Westmead and 14,000 segments have been produced to date. The facility currently has two months of inventory buffer, or about 6,000 concrete segments. The production is expected to be completed by Dec-24.
