Tom Price 09-10 October 203

Gee, this is a cold place! Woke up Thursday morning after a night under the doona (yep, a bloody doona - all night - and pyjamas!!!!) and had to go searching for a jacket to fend off the chill. It must have got down to at least 18C overnight! We had definitely acclimatised to Marble Bar which was well over 40 every day we were there (it was already 39.5 when we drove out of town at 10:35 in the morning).
SHOES! We had to squeeze our feet into shoes so we could go on the Rio Tinto mine tour. Really felt weird and uncomfortable after two months in thongs and sandals. OH&S running riot once again - even though the only place you get off the bus is in the car park at the lookout over the original main mine pit, closed footwear, hard hats and safety glasses must be worn! Perhaps they are worried that one of the planes carrying the FIFO people in will crash on someone who is not adequately protected.....
The tour was good value tough. Cheaper and longer than the one in Port Headland, but soooooo much better. Baz, the guy driving the bus, had a really dry sense of humour and actually knew a lot about the mining operation, the specs of the various machines, and the costs involved.
So, since I haven't really tried to bore anyone senseless with numbers 'til now, here are some stats:
Rio Tinto have 14 iron ore mines in the Pilbra and expect to be able to continue mining here for anywhere between 24 and 150 years;
They have 36 large dump trucks at Tom Price that can carry 240 tonnes of ore at a time. They have a 2500hp diesel/electric engine, have a 4920 lt fuel tank, have a working life of four years and cost $4.5 milion dollars each. There are also 6 smaller trucks which can 'only' carry 100 tonne at a time, but no-one talks about them much;
There are over 1 million bearings supporting the conveyor belt systems used to transport the ore from stock piles to crushers, washers, trains and ships etc. One section is over twenty kilometers long and runs a single continuous rubber belt (that's one big lakka band!);
There is 1600km of heavy duty standard gauge railway track;
There are 48 trains running on the tracks every day, each one consisting of three 4500hp locos hauling 236 wagons, with a total length of 2.5km (a bit shorter than the BHP Biliton 3.2km ones, but still pretty impressive) and a total load of 27,376 tonne per train with an average of 4 trains from the Tom Price site alone a day. The trains take approximately 90 minutes to unload, which is done by turning two wagons at a time upside down over a hopper.
Everything is simply massive, costs huge amounts of money, and is covered in red dust, but I hear the profits are pretty good....

 

Drove up Mount Nameless (You can walk, or even run, but c'mon now!) to get a bird's eye view of the mine site, town and surrounds. It is a really steep rough 4x4 track, which takes around 30 minutes from bottom to top. To give some idea of how tough a drive is, it takes around two hours to go up the walking trail, but the record for running up (yes there are people stupid and/or fit enough to do that) is a shade over 16 minutes. Anyhow, we made it to the top and the views were pretty good I have to say. It is the highest point in WA you can drive to at 1016m, and you can see for miles and miles and miles. In fact I could see our place from there. You know, the one in the caravan park at the foot of the mountain.