Engineer Thomas wins two awards for railway sleeper sustainability

20 May 2023

Engineer Thomas wins two awards for railway sleeper sustainability

University of Southern Queensland graduate Thomas Murphy has won two national awards for his honours thesis on railway sleeper design. 

“When I started looking into what I could do my Honours thesis project on, I saw it as an opportunity to explore something I had a keen interest in – and railway engineering was related to my program,” said Murphy, whose project focussed on the sustainability of Australia’s railway sleepers.

“I conducted a detailed review and analysis of current rail track structures before investigating how emerging sleeper technologies could impact track behaviour in Australia and the best way to employ them,” he added . “I looked at the effectiveness of interspersing railway sleepers of different materials together, that is a timber railway sleeper next to a concrete sleeper, or one concrete sleeper for every two to four timber railway sleepers. “Based on my results I was able to make a recommendation for the interspersing ratio, which in turn can ultimately help to improve the sustainability and durability of our railways.”

With thanks to the Australian Manufacturing Forum