Trains will need slower speeds beneath Parkville to protect hospitals

Trains in Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel will have to run slower near the new Parkville station, a leaked government report shows, under a plan to limit interference with sensitive cancer and medical scanning equipment.

Flaws in the $14 billion project were exposed after a report to the state government’s Infrastructure Development Committee was leaked to The Age, revealing construction delays, potential compensation claims and plans to dump elements of the mega-project to cut ballooning costs.

The new Parkville station.Credit: Penny Stephens

But along with these issues, which the government argues are part of any infrastructure project of this scale, unresolved problems remain with cancer treatment equipment at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Parkville, and with sensitive microscopes at RMIT in the CBD.

The new rail tunnel runs beneath Parkville’s $1.2 billion Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre, which opened in 2016, two years before the tunnel started construction. The Peter Mac is located within the cancer centre.

Trains running through the Metro Tunnel cause electromagnetic interference with medical equipment, an issue that planners began warning politicians in 2015 would need to be managed particularly with an eye to sensitive magnetic resonance imaging machines.

MRI machines use magnetic fields and radio waves to take detailed pictures of patients.

At one research centre in the precinct, the Peter Doherty Institute, the train tunnel runs just 20 metres from an ultra-sensitive microscope in the institute’s basement, and has caused major issues.

The leaked report makes clear that patients have not been affected because 11 MRI machines in the Parkville hospital precinct have been moved to upper levels of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, the Royal Women’s Hospital, or to a cancer centre run by Peter Mac at its old East Melbourne site.

The report puts costs to the taxpayer so far from the mitigation efforts at $181 million.

During testing in June, machines at Peter Mac failed to meet reliability standards when trains ran through the tunnel under the hospital, the document says.

The new rail line is expected to open to the public next year, with peak-hour trains running every three minutes beneath the hospital precinct. The leaked government report proposes a range of strategies to limit the trains’ impact on hospital medical instruments.

The report says that “based on advice from international experts and modelling of electromagnetic interference levels”, mitigation strategies will include an amperage limit “in the electrical section [of the rail tunnel] through Parkville, restricting High-Capacity Metro Trains’ acceleration and deceleration performance”.

The fleet of 70 specially built High-Capacity Metro Trains to run through the tunnel cost Victorians $2.3 billion (there were originally 65 trains but five more were bought to run on the stalled airport rail line).

The documents reveal that if more measures to deal with electromagnetic interference are not put in place, the trains could create further headaches when they are eventually upgraded from seven carriages to 10 as planned.

“This is not anticipated for at least 15 years,” the report says.

Current strategies also do not account for the possibility of a second Metro Tunnel connecting to Parkville, and any increase in demand for power from the nearby tram network.

The leaked report also shows that three transmission electron microscopes at RMIT’s City Campus remain unreliable despite upgrades to shield them.

The university and the project are in discussions about a $12 million commercial settlement, and RMIT is investigating a new facility where it could relocate sensitive equipment, notes on the status report say.

Premier Jacinta Allan said on Wednesday that along with the usual teething problems on a project of this scale, dealing with the electromagnetic interference issue was a challenge “a little bit unique” to Melbourne.

“We are working collaboratively with ... the hospital and the other institutions in the Parkville precinct to both continue to deliver world-class patient care and also deliver the Metro Tunnel,” she said.

Allan said no patient care had been compromised by the issues created by the new train tunnel.

Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas said on Wednesday that she was pleased with the way mitigation strategies for sensitive health equipment had progressed. Work was still under way with hospitals and manufacturers, she said.

Credit: Matt Golding

“Obviously, train testing started last year, and that’s when we really saw whether or not those strategies were working,” Thomas told Nine News. “We’ve still got some work to do to resolve the issues at Peter Mac, but I want to be very clear right now, there has been no impact on patient care whatsoever.

“We have had a lot of success in terms of Royal Melbourne Hospital and strategies that we’ve put in place there. We will continue to work on mitigation strategies for the MRI equipment at Peter Mac.”

Opposition transport infrastructure spokesman David Southwick said the issue had thrown doubt over the future of the Parkville medical precinct.

A state government spokesperson said the tunnel had been future-proofed to ensure it could eventually run 10-carriage trains and that minimising impact from the trains had “no impact on travel times between stations”.

“We don’t shy away from delivering world-class infrastructure that Victorians deserve – this is a project that the Liberals ran away from and cancelled when they had the chance to build it,” the spokesperson said.

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