At approximately 6:35am on 3 April 2023 a tip truck entered the level crossing at Barwon Terrace in South Geelong from an unsealed side road that ran parallel to the broad gauge rail line.
This positioned it between the boom barriers and the track as an oncoming passenger train approached and crashed into it. A subsequent investigation into the death of the 57-year-old driver, found that the unsealed access road, not identified as an emerging risk, allowed a truck to bypass the crossing’s safety features.
The train driver and conductor were fortunately left uninjured.
New Year’s Eve, 2023. Two train workers are left dead in South Australia after a 75-year-old truck driver carrying avocados heading east towards Broken Hill collides with a Pacific National train, nearly two kilometres in length, travelling from Sydney to Perth at a level crossing on the Barrier Highway.
The incident happened at 10.30am. Double stacked containers were toppled from the train near Bindarrah leaving behind a wild scene of wreckage.
Mary Gilmore Way near Bribbaree, in the central west of New South Wales. It’s late September 2025. Six rail carriages are derailed after a B-double carrying livestock collides with a freight train around 6.45am at a passive level crossing.
Initial reports suggest the truck driver may have been driving into the sun at the time, impairing visibility and potentially contributing to the collision. The truck reportedly hit the side of the train’s carriages after the driver swerved at the last minute to avoid a head-on collision.
Less than a month later, a Mackay cane train driver suffers critical injuries after colliding with a truck at a level crossing in north Queensland.
These incidents and dozens of others like them are a dangerous reality across the country. In Victoria there are some 500 level crossings that trucks and other vehicles share with trains.
Around 180 of these crossings have no physical form of barrier. Victorian Transport Association CEO, Peter Anderson first set out to find a solution to this real and present danger some nine years ago following the tragic Kerang rail incident in 2007 — the state’s worst rail disaster. Where the Murray Valley Highway crosses the Piangil railway line, a truck loaded with timber and pipe fittings ploughed into a southbound train causing the death of 11 people and injuring 23 others.
One fatal crash previously occurred at the crossing 12 years earlier and several near misses between rail and road vehicles had been recorded in the months leading up to the 2007 accident.
Warning signs at the rail crossing including flashing lights and bells, again, proved inadequate.
Anderson, after looking into the incident, decided there had to be another way. One of the observations he made concerned the preventative measures in place.
Flashing signals are for naught, he surmised, if visibility is compromised at night or reduced in heavy fog or a hairpin bend conceals a train moving at over 80 kilometres-per-hour. After explaining the issue to an IT team, they came up with a proposal involving a transponder situated further down the rail line that would send a signal triggered by an oncoming train.
“For the next minute or two minutes anyone in the local area with a little receiver would know there’s a train in the area when they receive the signal,” says Anderson.
“That would bring caution to the way that you drive if you’re in a truck. That was the idea and they gave me some costings. Key fobs could be made in China for about $20 each. It involved very little outlay.”
Anderson, by now had joined the Rail Safety Crossing Committee convened at the time by Jeroen Weimar, who was later appointed as CEO of the state’s Commonwealth Games Organising Committee.
From this vantage Anderson began gathering data and information from reports and different incidents and got to see firsthand how the rail industry approached safety. He soon discovered it was entirely risk adverse.
“Unless something is foolproof it doesn’t get accepted in every perspective,” said Anderson. “It’s one of the things that holds back the development of rail in our country.”
WHG is an Australian telematics and technology provider that connects over 45,000 devices monthly. There is a business unit within the greater company dedicated to structural health monitoring.
Chad Molenaar and Nabeel Elias both work within it creating data capturing technology. It’s one of the few companies in the segment where the designs of the hardware and circuit boards all get made in-house. They had, without access to the rail network, 3D-printed a replica rail section to facilitate an evaluation of an asset. They fixed a gauge to it — and It worked.
“Everyone is trying to sweat the assets,” says Elias. “The problem is you can’t sweat the assets unless you know the health of the asset.”
By chance, Anderson visiting the WHG offices liked what he saw and asked, given they could monitor the health of the rail, if they could tell if a train was on it.
Strain gauge has been around since the 1930s. Not much, like a lot of rail technology, has changed since then. The issue with legacy strain gauges is the install. It is time consuming and costly. WHG came up with a spotweld strain gauge that would be unobtrusive and easy to install.
“You don’t need two layers of adhesive and a coating material and all these unbelievable requirements,” said Elias. “As a wireless device there is no need for cabling. It has circular solar panels that charge it. In terms of harvesting, a lot of our technology we have built we come back to when we need it.”
Power consumption on one of these units is minimal. It can be left on battery and require a charge every couple of years depending on the frequency at which it is sampling.
The main unit provides two options.
It can, as part of the structural health component store data in the cloud. The other component on the unit is its utility as an amplification system that can message within a certain radius. It sends a signal down the line to any vehicle in that area or any worker in close proximity. An e-tag device or a keychain fob would get a ping inside the cabin to alert the driver of the nearby presence of a train.
“From an end-user functionality perspective, it’s brilliance is its simplicity,” says Molenaar. “We’re using proven technology in a unit we use in other areas of the business. We know that it is solid and it’s strong with connectivity that we use in the telematics side, so we have constant uptime.”
As long as the radii overlap between each unit, multiple units can be employed to send a signal down the line as far as needed.
“The cloud part of it is excellent because you’re getting a twofer one solution at that point,” said Elias. “You have the immediate benefits of people crossing over the rail and then the long-term monitoring of the health itself, so you don’t have to send people out there to do maintenance all the time. Or you might need to send them out sooner if you get questionable readings.”
The SMH Rail Sense System as it is unofficially known is not expensive to implement. To protect each level crossing, the rail industry could feasibly adopt it for as little as $5000. Building a controlled rail intersection with boom gates and flashing signals costs in today’s economic landscape over $2 million.
All the more reason for Anderson’s disappointment in failing to find support for the project from the rail sector which, to date, refuses to even entertain a trial.
“All we’re asking for is to demonstrate how it works,” he says. “And it’s a national solution. We’ve tried everything and so far. I’ve only encountered reluctance to accept anything different.”
Anderson applauded the team at WHG, whom, without any funding or access to a railway, got to work on the project.
Molenaar echoed Anderson’s frustrations.
“We’ve got a lot of experience in delivering new applications to help alleviate this pain point that they have,” he said.
“It really is just trying to add a layer of safety to an area that currently has none. It’s not like we’re trying to replace something in the space or we’re trying to say this is superior to the current system that is sitting there.”
He added, “Because there isn’t anything sitting there.”
Anderson said governing bodies inside rail are unwilling to consider new potential solutions outside awareness campaigns and adding road signs.
“Signs are the cheapest form of road management,” says Anderson. “The prevailing attitude to risk – any risk at all – is so adverse they don’t want to adopt anything new.”
The typical and current flashing red warning signals at railway crossings were launched in rail infrastructure in 1913 when the horse and cart was still the dominant mode of travel. In road vehicle language it doesn’t adequately translate according to Anderson.
“Red, yellow, green. Solid red is stop. Yellow caution, green go. That’s our messaging. That’s our language in driving on the road,” he said. “Yet we’re trying to keep cars and trucks away from trains.”
Anderson added, “They’re still putting detonators on tracks to go bang to tell people there’s a train coming. That’s how archaic the rail industry is.”
There is a truck driver somewhere in Australia right now who could have his or her life saved by having a fob on their keychain or an e-tag equivalent in the cab.
“It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I’m driving through the country and it’s pitch black,” says Anderson. “I’m driving through a town, and it suddenly goes off. Guess what I do? I slow down. Maybe I’m not even aware there’s a train line. But now I know there’s a train line close by. Now I’m on caution. I’m on yellow in road language looking for a train. Now we give the driver a chance to protect himself.”
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