In 1955, a geologist named Henry Evans discovered that the ‘reddish cliffs’ in the Weipa area of the Cape York Peninsula were actually enormous deposits of bauxite, the ore used to produce aluminium and other elements such as tungsten. Today Weipa represents the largest proven bauxite deposits in the world and, as a result of this and the other bauxite sites, Australia produces some 37% of the world’s aluminium.
Following the discovery of the Weipa ore deposits, the Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation (Comalco) was established in 1957 and commercial mining commenced in 1964 with an annual production of 0.5M tonnes. By 2008 the output had climbed to 20M tonnes per annum. In 2006 Rio Tinto bought out the minority shareholders in Comalco and later combined forces with Alcan to form Rio Tinto Alcan who now own and run the operation.
At its Andoom Mine, some 20km north of Weipa township, today in 2011 the ore is transported up to 25km by large road transport vehicles along ‘haul roads’ to the central processing area where it is cleaned and graded and then loaded into railway ore wagons for the rail trip along an isolated standard gauge rail link to Lorim Point stockpile. From here it is transported by ship to various refining facilities.
The current rail operation centres around two EDI - EMD 2,260 KW/3030HP locomotives and three 32 wagon sets of 100 tonne capacity wagons operating between the Andoom Mine and the Lorim Point receival facility. A ‘mechanical arm’ propels the wagons for loading and unloading at Andoom and Lorin Point respectively whilst one of the locomotives moves empty and loaded wagons between both locations. A round trip for the locomotive takes about 75 minutes and the railway operates on a 24 hour 7 days per week basis. It is a driver only operation and train control is via train order radio.
In this presentation we shall view round trip rail operations between Lorim Point ore loader and Andoom Mine, operation as Andoom Mine, the rail and loading facilities at Lorim Point, witness ‘out-of-gauge’ heavy equipment transported by rail and review Weipa locomotives both old (former Comalco) and current (Rio Tinto Alcan).
Approximate run time: 97 minutes.