The train is so long that from the driver's seat its end is invisible, somewhere behind a low rise four minutes down the track. It carries 29,000 tonnes of iron ore from a mine in the red desert of Western Australia's north-west to a port on the coast, 420 kilometres away. Our video, at the top of this page, rides the whole journey in twelve minutes. This is the story around it.
The driver's seat
Deb Castellano has driven ore trains for Kurrajong Heavy Haul for sixteen years. Her cab is air-conditioned, which matters when the steel outside passes 50°C in summer, and fitted with two screens that show the brake pressure on every wagon behind her. She starts each shift with a coffee and a printed track bulletin listing speed restrictions, work gangs and one stretch where a family of camels has been seen near the line.
"People think driving a train is sitting still," she says in the video. "It is mostly braking. You start braking for the port an hour before you get there."
Locomotives in the middle
A train this long cannot be pulled from the front alone. The couplings would snap. Kurrajong runs two further locomotives in the middle and near the rear, controlled by radio from Castellano's cab. When she opens the throttle, all three respond within a second. When she brakes, the same signal goes down the whole length, so the rear half does not shove the front half as it slows.
If the radio link drops, which happens in a few cuttings where the rock blocks the signal, the remote locomotives hold their last command until contact returns. Castellano knows every one of those cuttings by name.
Two hundred and forty wagons
Each of the 240 wagons carries about 120 tonnes of ore and weighs 21 tonnes empty. Loaded at the mine by a chute that fills one wagon every 30 seconds, the whole train takes about two hours to load while it creeps forward at walking pace. The track is a single line with passing loops every 30 kilometres, and empty trains returning to the mine wait in the loops for loaded ones to pass.
A full round trip takes around 20 hours. Kurrajong runs 14 trains a day on the line, planned from a control room at the port by a team of six controllers working twelve-hour shifts.
The car dumper
At the port, the train rolls slowly into a building that looks like a hangar. Inside, the car dumper grips two wagons at a time and turns them upside down, emptying 240 tonnes of ore into a pit in less than a minute. The wagons have rotary couplings, so the train never has to be broken apart. The dust is kept down with water sprays, and the sound in the video is a low rumble followed by a long hiss.
From the pit, conveyors carry the ore to a stockyard, where machines called stackers lay it in long ridges sorted by grade. Other machines, reclaimers, dig it back out when a ship arrives and send it to a shiploader on the wharf. A 200,000-tonne bulk carrier takes about seven trains' worth of ore and a day and a half to fill.
Back up the line
Castellano's shift ends at the port. A relief driver takes the empty train back into the desert, and she rides a minibus to the crew house. Her last task is to write up the shift log: two speed restrictions, one camel, no faults. The train she brought in is already heading back toward the mine, lighter by 29,000 tonnes and moving faster than it did coming down. For more on the plants and machines behind raw materials, see the Industry desk.
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