Noble Park’s Eddie Blanchfield has fought off snakes in the pursuit of keeping Melbourne’s trains going.
The 77-year-old still remembers the unsettling encounters with the slithery reptiles along the patches of long grass he had to traverse to get to the train substations.
For more than 30 years, Eddie maintained and repaired Melbourne’s substations that fed power to the trains.
Living right near Noble Park station, trains have been Eddie’s life.
As a teenage apprentice in 1955, Eddie remembers learning to repair the whirring cogs and moving parts of the old-fashioned rotary substations before they were upgraded to solid state models.
“It was a big deal, a huge step forward,” he remembers of the new technology.
Now he’s a witness to another big upgrade entering the network.
The first of nine new substations were switched on in Dandenong in September as the network makes way for high capacity trains.
The newer substations are needed to provide reliable power to longer trains and new signalling infrastructure.
Although not really visible to the general public, the substations provide a vital conversion of power into the right voltage needed to power railways.
Crews have been taking advantage of the school holidays to continue level crossing removal work on the Cranbourne and Pakenham lines, installing over 17km of overhead wiring between Dandenong and Yarraman, and completing 200 metres of track upgrade at Mile Creek.
For Eddie, the train repair work still goes on through his son, who now works as an engineer for Metro.
