Inland Rail
Project details
Clients: Future Freight Joint Venture (FFJV) and Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC)
Location: Inland Rail is a 1,700 km freight rail connecting Melbourne to Brisbane through regional Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland.
Industry: Rail
Business Services Provided: Management of the Environmental Impact Statements and providing environmental and GIS support across a number of project packages in Queensland.
Summary
The Cowie Environmental Services (Cowie) team utilised their experience in managing major infrastructure projects to provide Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) support across a number of packages within the Inland Rail program. Cowie personnel filled multiple roles, within a number of key contractors working on the Inland Rail project to excel in the delivery of EISs in Queensland.
As well as managing the EIS aspects for the project, Cowie also provided ongoing environmental support to the internal project engineering and management team to support the project design. Cowie also provided early guidance on proposed design and offered suggestions on design changes to ensure positive environmental outcomes for the project.
Key Roles and Responsibilities
EIS Coordinator
A number of key Cowie personnel acted in an EIS Coordinator role across a number of Inland Rail packages in Queensland. Cowie personnel in this role were responsible for coordinating all environmental aspects associated with their respective EIS for the broader Inland Rail project.
This role required Cowie personnel to work with a range of technical professionals to ensure the delivery of high-quality deliverables, which met client expectations of timing and budget as well as meeting Coordinator-General requirements. This role also required consistency checks across disciplines, and across EISs to ensure consistency across all packages.
There were also instances where technical leads required access to land to undertake field work. The EIS coordinator facilitated this by liaising with the land access team to ensure the proper channels were followed to ensure land access could be appropriately gained.
In addition, this role required the authoring of a number of EIS chapters as well as writing and reviewing a large number of information requests from the Coordinator-General and submissions from the public, post public notification of the draft EISs.
GIS Coordinator
This role required the coordination of the GIS specialist team, across all Queensland packages, to ensure the successful delivery of the GIS mapping components of the EISs. This role required close consultation with technical disciplines to produce figures and mapping that accurately reflected each technical assessment requirements. This role required the management of client expectations on timing, while also maintaining quality and consistency.
Key Outcomes
- Valuable experiences working on a significant nation-building project across multiple states
- Valuable skills maintained through the management of teams of specialist consultants and sub-consultants to meet timing and quality expectations of the client
- Cowie performed a number of different interrelated roles within the project, each contributing to the final submission of the EISs with aims for the successful delivery of the project as a whole.