Tony Weston will present on the following subject:
Rail haulage in Australian underground metal mines
In the 1500s engineers building and operating underground copper, silver, gold and lead mines in Middle Europe came upon an alternative to leather sacks on men’s backs for the transport of ore and waste rock. Small trollies running on wooden wheels worked by skilled men, carried ore on parallel wooden planks in small profile tunnels and greatly increased the productivity of metal mines. These trollies morphed into ones with iron flanged wheels running on timber or iron rails set at 15 to 18 inch gauge. In Australia this type of transport on mainly level tunnels with men or horses providing the traction later operated on wider gauge tracks with locomotive haulage. It reached its peak of development in the 1960s and 1970s at mines such as Mt Isa where overhead-wire electric locomotives on 3 ft 6 in gauge tracks hauled up to eight million tonnes of ore and waste rock in a year, in addition to battery locomotive haulage of personnel and materials. Underground diesel trucks and conveyors took over from rail haulage beginning in the 1960s and unfortunately, there is only one large scale underground mine rail system remaining in Australia.
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