Australia's Busiest Port Needs an Urgent Upgrade

Video hosted and narrated by Fred Mills. This video and article contain paid promotion for Bentley Systems.

IT IS one of Australia’s most important infrastructure sites – the Port of Melbourne. Millions of containers pass through it every year – more than anywhere else in the country – and the number is set to soar in the coming decades.

But it's been facing some tricky challenges.

In order to meet future demand and increase capacity – while also running fewer trucks to improve air quality – the port needed to make huge changes.

Which is why a major programme of work has just been carried out to fix both problems at once. From rearranging railways to tackling difficult ground conditions with state-of-the-art tech, this is how the people behind Australia’s mega-port upgrade have kept it on track.

On a high

With the most skyscrapers, the largest stadium and now the highest population, Melbourne has officially taken the title of Australia’s biggest city. Sorry, Sydney.

And yet there’s one other part worthy of attention which no one really talks about, despite millions of people relying on it every day.

It might not have a fancy skybridge or the facilities to host giant sporting events but without it, this city – and country – would struggle to function as it does. We’re talking about the Port of Melbourne.

Above: Melbourne's port is the largest in Australia for general cargo. Image courtesy of Port of Melbourne.

Covering a huge area of land at the mouth of the Yarra River, it consists of several man-made docks that have been operating since the late 1800s. These include the giant Victoria, Appleton, Webb and Swanson Docks.

Today, over a third of the shipping containers that pass in and out of the country come through this port. In fact, it handles over 3.2 million twenty-foot-long units filled with essential goods annually.

That’s a lot. If you were to line that many containers up end-to-end, it would reach halfway around the Earth.

As for what they contain, when we say essential goods, we mean it. Inside these big colourful boxes are things like vehicles, appliances, furniture, and — perhaps most importantly of all — coffee and beer.

Doing its part

Thanks to all this thirst-quenching trade, the port now contributes more than AUD $11BN — about USD $7.5BN — to the country’s economy every year.

Of course, none of this works without transportation — and we’re not just talking about the big ships that carry the containers overseas.

There’s also a vast system of road and rail infrastructure to get them to their eventual destinations on land. And that requires a whole lot of trucks and freight trains.

But there’s a problem — well, several of them. Firstly, the port is heading for major growth.

Now, ideally most of the extra cargo will be distributed via rail as trains can shift more containers and it’s better for the environment, but there's an issue with capacity.

Above: Container volumes are set to double by 2050. Image courtesy of Port of Melbourne.

Limitations with the existing infrastructure have made it difficult to get enough trains coming and going, so most goods have had to go by road.

Which brings us on to the second issue — the trucks that have had to do most of that heavy lifting.

Because they can only take two or three containers each, there’s a lot of them driving around at all times, and that’s adding strain to the already congested road network.

Air pollution and congestion in the inner western suburbs has gotten so bad, one council had to declare a health emergency.

Feeling the strain

“There's only so much traffic that the road network can handle. And so, we needed to find other ways to get the containers in and out of the port environment,” said Matthew Brooks, senior project manager for the Port of Melbourne.

“Melbourne's in a quite unique position as well. We're a city port. A lot of the other ports around the world and in Australia aren't necessarily located in the very middle of a metropolis.”

It was decided, then, that something had to be done to shift the balance away from road towards rail.

And it would need to happen in Swanson Dock, which has an International Container Terminal and is surrounded by the existing train tracks.

Above: It's not common for major ports to be located so close to a city centre, according to Matthew Brooks.

Until recently there were four intermodal terminals — combining both road and rail — along with more than 10 km of dual-gauge track. Why dual-gauge, and what does that even mean?

Well, Australia is one of the only places in the world that has tracks of different gauges — or width, in other words — across a large network, within the same country.

Therefore, the port needs to have the infrastructure to accommodate trains that run on each type of track, across long distances.

The system that serves the port covers three States, and that’s a lot of land in this part of the world.

As well as Victoria, where Melbourne is the capital, the network reaches all the way to New South Wales and South Australia, terminating at Sydney and Adelaide.

Heading for trouble

The trouble is, the terminals back at port won’t be able to get rail deliveries in and out quick enough in the future, and there is a lack of space for bigger trains.

"As we get towards six million containers, that's going to pose quite a few problems for capacity throughout the entire port. So a lot of work needs to be put in over the next 20-30 years on realigning the way that the port currently operates,” explained Brooks. “And one of the key areas for that is increasing the amount of containers that are imported and exported out of the port area on rail.”

You see, whereas trucks can only carry an average of 2.8 containers each, a 600-metre-long locomotive can carry 84 containers in one go. But there’s been nowhere on Swanson Dock to put them.

And because there was no way to directly transfer containers from sea to rail, they had to be put on trucks and carried to the trains before they could continue their journey.

Above: Trucks can only carry a few containers at a time. Image courtesy of Port of Melbourne.

The solution to this puzzle was this: the Port Rail Transformation Project. It’s a highly complex scheme of works that was completed earlier in 2024 and took around two years.

Encompassing an area of 82,000 square metres, it called for an additional rail terminal to be built, along with improvements to the existing rail and road networks. This ensured better connectivity across both modes of transport.

To make the base for the new Swanson Dock East Rail Terminal, 36,000 tonnes of pavement material was broken up, refined and relaid as part of the new surface.

This meant digging through several layers of ground that had been constructed over centuries.

”Because the site had been used multiple times and you had things like asphalt interlocked pavers, concrete slabs, all sorts of stuff throughout the substrate we were actually able to take a lot of those previous layers of development away and then put them back onto the site and form the basis of the new pavements we constructed,” Brooks recalled.

Treading carefully

Around 30% of all the material excavated for the project was reused, drastically reducing the amount of contaminated waste being sent to landfill.

Yes, you heard that right. With the site having such a long history of industrial use, there were concerns about the presence of chemicals and other nasty substances hidden below the surface.

Particularly when another nearby project, the West Gate Tunnel, faced big problems with soil contamination. Fortunately, after some early preparations, the levels found here were a lot easier to handle.

“There was a lot of work put in upfront with investigative boreholes and everything to determine the levels of contamination across the site. At the time there was a lot of media around things like PFAS in the soil,” said Brooks. 

"There was a lot of concern that we'd have high levels of that given the sort of industrialised environment and previous chemicals used for firefighting and that sort of stuff in the area. But luckily, the results came back that that was all within a sort of manageable level."

Above: Recycled material was used extensively across the site. Image courtesy of Port of Melbourne.

The next challenge was to construct a pair of extra-long sidings at the new terminal for those bigger trains.

Now, if you’re not familiar with the rail lingo, a siding is a short section of track away from a main line, usually for storing, loading and unloading trains.

Each one was constructed from around 4,000 cubic metres of concrete and a whole lot of steel rebar for reinforcement.

Another key part was an interface between the new railyard and the International Container Terminal, creating a direct link between ships and trains.

Finally, a new rail connection was built between two of the main docks and a road was put in to replace one that had to be removed to make way for the works.

Staying out of the way

This all had to be done without disrupting the daily activities that keep this place running like a well-oiled machine.

Oh, and there was a whole load of other obstacles in place too, including underground cables and drainage systems.

There was a lot to be done and not a great deal of time to plan it. WSP was brought in as design consultant for the project, teaming up with contractor Seymour Whyte Constructions.

Given 12 weeks to submit all the design documents, and six weeks to produce the first results, time was of the essence.

The team had to find a way for the more than 250 people on the project to collaborate as closely as possible.

With it they could manage vast amounts of information, streamline their workflows and provide real-time access to the data and digital models — all in one place.

Above: A lot of existing utilities had to be avoided during the excavation. Image courtesy of Port of Melbourne.

They achieved this by investing in a system based on the iTwin Platform and ProjectWise software from Bentley Systems. It enabled them to create a connected data environment that proved critical to meeting project milestones.

“Given the tight timeframe, we had to get everything right and we couldn't afford to have rework, conflicting designs or uncoordinated designs as well. So, this is where that single source of truth connected environment really came into play,” explained Alex Yammas, regional digital engineering lead at WSP.

“It had all of those key tools that we needed to do our coordination — so we could view the model, we could do clash detection in there, we could cut up the model and section it as we wanted,” he said.

“The way we were working was more agile in the sense that everyone knew what was happening and could be confident in what they were looking at at any given time on the project.”

Time to reflect

So, now the upgrade has been finished and the port works towards getting the site fully operational, how does someone that played such a crucial role in the scheme look back on it?

“I feel extremely privileged to be able to work on a project from start to finish and take it all the way from concept design through to reality,” concluded Brooks.

“But also being able to have such a tangible impact on the Victorian and Australian economy and deliver assets that will be used for the next 50-200 years is just an incredible feeling."

Above: Bentley's iTwin allowed Yammas and his team to carry out visual design reviews and ensure issues were resolved quickly, while keeping waste to a minimum and avoiding rework. Image courtesy of WSP. 

The Port of Melbourne has evolved massively over the past couple of hundred years, and without this immense project it would have struggled to take its crucial next step.

But thanks to these amazing teams, this epicentre of trade is not just primed for more expansion; the benefits of their work will soon be delivered far and wide.

This video and article contains paid promotion for Bentley Systems. Learn more about how Bentley is advancing the world's infrastructure here.

Video narrated and hosted by Fred Mills. Additional footage and images courtesy of Port of Melbourne.

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