Tom Price Mine Tour

The mine tour was a coach ride through a working Rio Tinto mine site just out of Tom Price. We exited the coach once to look at the pit and trucks driving past, the scale of everything was mind blowing. The tour guide was very informative, we learnt so much in an hour. Some of the facts we could remember for the following topics were as follows:

The Mine:
- They mine ion ore which is dark grey but it turns red as it oxidises
- 16 mines in the area and one new one will be opening soon

Trains:
- If the trains have a blue light on the front they are autonomous,
- Diesel train engines power huge generators that provide power to electric wheel motors to push and compressors for air braking
- They use three engines to pull, they can also use three on the back to slow it down after helping to push it up hill
- They carry up to 250 carriages
- Each carriage weighs 10 ton and they load it with 110 ton of iron ore
- it takes only 19 seconds to load each carriage with 110ton
- train constantly moves at 1-2 kilometres per hour
- It takes an hour and a half to fill a train with 5 million dollars of ion ore

Tip Trucks:
- Each wheel weighs 4ton
- 6 wheels on each and hence 24 ton all up. -Wheels are as tall as the bus
- Trucks weigh 200 ton and can Carry 250 ton.
- 16 cylinder 2000hp Diesel engine that run big generators to power the electric wheel motors on the rear, like a train
- They Carry 4000 litres of fuel and use 25l per kilometre when loaded going up hill
- They re-fuel approximately every 24 hours.

Power station:
- Runs on gas turbines
- gas is piped from 130 kilometres away
- Each 1 meter of pipe weighs 1.4 ton because it is so re-enforced.Read more