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North part of West Australia |
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
 In recent weeks we have been travelling thru the Northern part of West Australia- this is the heart of the mining boom area.
We spent a few days at Mt. Tom Price which is the main town servicing Rio Tintos iron ore mines.
They have 9 mines in the area producing 120 million tons of high grade iron ore per year. This all has to be loaded onto rail wagons and sent about 400 km to the 2 export ports. The ore trains are astounding- approx 2.4 km long with 230 wagons each carrying 105 tons of ore - that's about 24,000 tons per train (by comparison I understand the coal trains that travel from the West Coast to Port Lyttleton carry about 3000 tons)
We did a very interesting tour of the Tom Price open cast mine. The haul trucks empty weigh 200 tons, and full about 500 tons. We saw one of these trucks being repaired at their workshop- the mechanic climbed a small ladder and crawled right inside the back diff to look at some problem.
The main problem for Rio Tinto apparently is to increase production- the bottleneck is getting more ore down the rail lines. If you use longer trains you have to rebuild all the ore loading and unloading facilities. However the Chinese can’t get enough of the stuff and bigger volumes. We spoke to a Railways signal technician- he told us that when his company transferred him from Brisbane to Port Hedland they doubled his salary, and paid his house rental costs which were $1200 per week. This is all typical of the labour shortage, accommodation shortage and general boom.
Our next destination is Broome and the Bungle bungles nation Park
Bob and Jill Dickinson
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Non club trips 
