Mrs Whitworth visits The Victorian Tunnelling Centre

The Victorian Tunnelling Centre

Mrs Whitworth recently visited the Victorian Tunnelling Centre as part of finding out what was on offer at Holmesglen TAFE. The Victorian Tunnelling Centre is located at Holmesglen Institute’s Drummond Street campus in Chadstone, where it offers specialist training to workers in the construction and operation of a variety of tunnels including rail, road, and utilities tunnels. 

The Australian-first tunnelling training centre is training thousands of workers as part of the Victorian Government's rail projects. 

Training for workers on Victoria’s ‘Big Build’ projects is still being delivered at the Drummond Street campus and includes civil construction apprenticeships, upskilling opportunities, high risk work licensing, tunnel safety inductions and virtual and augmented tunnel safety training. 

Training is aimed at all levels, from new entrants, existing workforce, engineers through to managers. The apprentices, trainees and cadets attending the VTC are the future workforce for infrastructure projects and come from across Victoria and Australia to be trained in the construction and operation of tunnels.

Working underground is not for the fainthearted - Mrs Whitworth found out that the tunnelling machine which slowly moves underground, tunnelling through the earth and houses full living quarters for the workers to live there for up to one month!