Tom Price Mine

We had to meet back at the visitors centre at 9.30am where we were picked up by coach and taken out to the Tom Price open cut iron ore mine. Rio Tinto's assets in the Pilbara are managed by Pilbara Iron and it operates ten mines, three ports and over 1600kms of railway track. The Tom Price mine commenced production in 1966.  Everything was oversized - the tyre from a loader has a diameter of 3.7metres which was taller than the coach we were travelling in. It required a specialised fork lift  to change it. We were taken to a lookout over the mine site where the mountain once stood and also got a close up look at an old digger. We drove through the processing plant and learnt that a lot of the operations are controlled remotely from Perth airport. There is big money to be made - the train drivers earn 250 000 p.a. but not sure about the lifestyle. This mine alone exports over 20 million tonnes of iron ore a year. At the completion of the tour we fuelled up and started heading towards Exmouth which was over 600 km away. We stopped at Paraburdoo for lunch which is another mining town. There were a couple of overnight roadside stops so we planned to get to one of these. There were huge storm clouds out to the side of us and we weren't sure if it was going to get us or not. We made it to Nanturra roadhouse and decided to continue on another 60km to the next rest stop. We set up and seemed to have missed the rain and hail which had already been here. The flies however, were driving us crazy. After dinner we enjoyed watching an electrical storm off in the distance.