Penrith Station

Scope

Penrith Station has an unused railway water tank from 1921: cast iron, with a 20,000-gallon single-tier tank forming the top of the tower, and years of railway history. The tank had to be sandblasted in the rail corridor, and its lead-based paint encapsulated so that no lead could contaminate anything outside the encapsulation.

Challenge

Our biggest challenge was protecting the scaffold from passing trains and making sure it could not become a conductor of electricity. Our answer was our own engineered, certified PVC hoarding: a plastic housing our design team created that joins onto the scaffold from the inside, protects it from the high-voltage wires and stops it conducting. We also had only one day to deliver 26 tonnes of scaffold and two days to install it, because the work in the rail corridor had to be done in a shutdown weekend.

Performance

Not every job goes to plan, but this one went without a hitch: the scaffold was finished within the time allowed. Sydney Trains said they had never seen a system like our PVC hoarding and were impressed. Because it was quick and efficient, trains ran to their normal timetable while the sandblasting went ahead, helping restore a great piece of railway history for generations to come.