Filling a missing link in South Australia's freight network has improved efficiency for local grain producers and created safer roads for the community.  

Located 100km northeast of Adelaide, Eudunda is home to about 700 residents, many of whom opposed freight vehicles using the town’s main street to travel between Worlds End Highway north of the town, and Thiele Highway to the south.

This created a gap in the local 26-metre B-double trucking network; freight access to the local grain handling facilities was limited to general access vehicles with a maximum length of 19-metres. Grain growers therefore weren’t able to take advantage of the efficiencies the larger B-doubles offer.

“The road they were using to get to A to B was a local council road – it didn’t meet the specifications for these larger restricted access vehicles,” explains Lee Wallis, Works Manager for the Regional Council of Goyder.

“In the last three to five years we were starting to see a bit more freight slip through the town.

“Eudunda is a small township and it’s very much a primary production area. We needed to improve the efficiency of the transport for grain in and out of the silo sites – that’s what the community were really after and we had a responsibility to deliver that.” 

The South Australian Government launched the 90-day ‘Improving Road Transport for the Agriculture Industry’ project. In mid-2015 Goyder proactively commissioned a planning study to investigate alternative freight access options and costs, then successfully engaged with the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure (DPTI) to explore funding opportunities through the 90-day project.

“There was an early dialogue between the council and DPTI, and once we clearly identified what the issues were, they were quite happy for the council to take the lead in consultation with the community in the first instance, and secondly in developing, designing and eventually constructing the project,” Wallis says.

“The community was very clear about how they perceived the freight movements needed to work around the township. From that, we engaged a local engineer, and council and the engineer were able to go to the design stage and come up with something that could physically work.”

The $1 million Eudunda Heavy Vehicle Town Bypass was the answer. The project involved construction of a new 500m council road extension and two junction upgrades at Thiele Highway and South Terrace.

The pressure was on the project team to complete the bypass before the November 2017 harvest period; that gave them a window of just 12 months.

Wallis says the extension of the new road involved an old rail reserve, which was under council care and control but was designated as community land, which meant the team had to navigate the revocation of community land.

“Being a rail reserve, there was some very low level site contamination, so there was some investigations done into the level of contamination. There was a lot of dust suppression done during works, and the outcome was to be able to reuse that material onsite, so we didn’t have to transport it off and deal with it as a waste,” Wallis says.

“We had some standard native vegetation type issues, we had to do an assessment and submit a vegetation clearance, and there was some land acquisition as well to accommodate the new intersection.”

Opened 10 November 2017, the Eudunda Heavy Vehicle Town Bypass was recognised at the 2018 IPWEA SA awards, winning the Excellence in Design/Construction of a Public Works Project under $1 million category.

“There were two previous ways of getting through the town – one was straight through the main street, and the other was to skirt around on one of the council roads. By providing a dedicated heavy vehicle bypass, it has reduced the volume of heavy vehicles trying to go through the main street, which for a small town is pretty congested at the best of times without trying to get heavy vehicles to go through as well,” Wallis says.

For Wallis, being able to deliver exactly what the community wanted was the highlight of the project.

“There wasn’t much of a compromise on what the community first asked for. Even with all the constraints, we were able to deliver a solution that satisfied everyone. You can’t always do that; nine times out of 10 there’s someone that’s never happy, but I think we managed to tick that box pretty well,” he says.

The completed bypass now allows for access to B-double vehicles, which represents a 33% productivity gain against a single vehicle. DPTI has also allowed 30m road train vehicles to travel from the Eudunda silo and bunker sites to Adelaide, which represents a 50% productivity gain for a single vehicle. This is expected to have an overall reduction of vehicle movements, which in turn translates to a reduction in fuel requirements and emissions generated by the transport operators.

Minister for Transport and Infrastructure Stephen Mullighan labelled the bypass “an important project for improving freight efficiency in this part of the Mid North,” and says it “also helps to improve safety on the roads in and around Eudunda.”

Image 1: Geoff Brock MP, RC Goyder Mayor Peter Mattey and RC Goyder CEO David Stevenson at the bypass opening. 

Image 2: A map of the project location. 
Image 3: Sealed new link road near Thiele Highway.