pilbra experience

In the interests of changing the feeling around here to something a bit more jovial I thought it may be of interest to relay to all some of my recent experiences on a trip to the Pilbra coast. I was visiting a relative that has lived there for over 10 years and currently drives iron ore trains out to the wharves where the ore is loaded onto ships.

I was lucky enough to be able to take a trip on a train out to the port and it was pretty amazing to see the sheer scale of what happens there day in day out. The train that I travelled on had three locos pulling 234 ore cars, each car carrying 110 tonnes of ore. This is typical of almost all loads that get transported from the mine out to a central yard before finally being taken out to the ports. That’s almost 26000 tonnes of ore on each train and I believe about 25 trains get taken to port each day, day after day after day. I guess there would be days when things went wrong and they wouldn’t get as many trains to port but at 25 a day that about 650 000 tonnes.

And this was just one location on the Pilbra coast, we travelled less than an hour up the road one day and there was another port which was having substantial rail and port upgrade being completed and I believe not much further up the road there was another substantial port doing exactly the same thing day in day out.

Despite the current takeover offer, I would love the think that I could one day travel on a train that was transporting FMS ore to port.

Oh and did I mention that it was unbelievably hot and everyone had to wear long sleeve shirts and trousers! Thank god my relative had a house with a pool.

Hope I haven’t bored everyone but I thought it was better than the current conversation.