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Iron ore trains are one of the unsung heroes of the Pilbara’s mammoth industry. Leading the world in heavy haulage, these trains also track the history of the region.
It was an inauspicious dawn of the rail age in Australia’s north western Pilbara region. But what began with short tramways and a problematic narrow gauge line from Port Hedland to Marble Bar over one hundred years ago, eventually became the lifeblood of Australia’s economic engine room.
As in many North West towns established in the late 1800s, tramways were built to service the early ports at Cossack and Balla Balla in the Pilbara. A more substantial railway, though still just narrow gauge, was built from Port Hedland to Marble Bar to service goldmining and the pastoral industry. The 114 mile railway was completed in 1912, and proceeded to run at a loss for 39 years until the last train came to a halt in 1951.
But a new era of heavy haulage standard gauge railways burst into existence with a flood of iron ore mines in the 1960’s. The first earthworks for the rail bed began in 1965 as iron ore mining permits and sales contracts were put in place for the Goldsworthy iron ore deposit. Construction proceeded at a cracking pace with over 100 kilometres completed and the first train running by May 1966. The line was then extended by 67 kilometres to the Shay Gap iron ore mine in 1972.
Meanwhile in 1965, construction began on a 292 kilometre railway from what would become the port of Dampier to another new iron ore mine at Mt Tom Price. Like the Goldsworthy line, the first train was running the following year and extensions to the line were proposed by 1968.
Boys toys
Bob Vanselow was an engineer who worked on the sewerage and water infrastructure of the new mining town of Paraburdoo. As a 14-year-old schoolboy in Victoria, Bob had been involved in restoring the narrow-gauge Puffing Billy railway in the Dandenong Ranges.
“We went up there and cut down trees and slashed blackberries and changed rotten sleepers in the track and did all those sorts of railway things. And I carried on doing that right through until I finished my engineering degree at Melbourne University,” he says.
As the initial construction of Paraburdoo drew to a close, Bob saw the opportunity to scale up his Puffing Billy experience to the construction of some of the world’s heaviest haulage railways.
“At the end of that project I noticed they were starting to build the railway from Tom Price to Paraburdoo and so I applied for a job.”
It was the beginning of what would become half of Bob’s life spent living in the Pilbara and working on the railways. Although the Pilbara was behind in many of the fashions and conveniences of the 1970’s, it quickly came to lead the world on heavy haulage rail technology.
Picnic train
Not only did the trains carry ever growing loads of iron ore, they were also employed in enriching the lives of workers in order to attract and retain the very best employees.
“Once you build a single line railway, you’ve really got a lot of spare capacity to grow the railway. And also in the meantime you can utilise that spare capacity for things like picnic trains. And at Christmas time we use to run shopping trains from the mine down to the coast which had much better facilities for shopping,” Bob recalls.
It was a time before fly-in-fly-out workers; when workers lived in mining towns and brought their families with them.
“People were very isolated in the mining communities… The roads in the early days were not even sealed all the way from Perth to Karratha,” remembers Bob.
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