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| Whaleback Mine |
Most of us are booked on a tour of the Whaleback Mine today. Was not Jill's thing so she chose to stay behind and do the washing. She says she had a lovely morning - 4 loads of washing and even changed the sheets on the bed.
The rest of us fronted up at the visitor's centre at 9:15 and headed off on the tour bus to Whaleback mine.
The Mount Whaleback mine, 6 kilometres west of Newman is majority-owned (85%) and operated by BHP, and is one of five iron ore mines the company operates in the Pilbara, in addition to operating two port facilities at Port Hedland and over 1,000 kilometres of rail. The Mount Whaleback deposit was discovered in 1957 but was not mined until 1968. When it was opened it was the biggest single-pit Open-pit iron ore mine in the world (developed originally by United States company Bechtel Pacific). The mine is 1.5 kilometres wide, more than five kilometres long and is scheduled to eventually reach a depth of 0.5 kilometres. The town of Newman was constructed just to service the mine as was the 426-kilometre railway line to Port Headland.
The Mount Newman railway is one of Australia’s longest private railways with much of its operation monitored and controlled from Perth. The rail journey from Newman to Port Hedland typically takes about eight hours. The 268 car trains are 2.89 kilometres long with each car carrying up to 138 tonnes of ore. On 21 June 2001, the line broke the world record for the heaviest train as well as the longest train when a train weighing 99,734 tons and formed of 682 wagons ran for 275 kilometres between Yandi and Port Hedland. The train was 7.3 kilometres long, carried 82,000 tons of iron ore and was hauled by eight GE AC6000CW locomotives.
The tour was fascinating. Initially, we drove up to the lookout with views over the mine pit. We then drove through the mine infrastructure before heading back to the Visitor Centre.
A big shop in the afternoon as it would be about two weeks before the next opportunity in Alice Springs over 3,000 km away.
