James Thompson

We got on the bus and went about 20 minutes out to the Western Range mine.

Now, the scale of these things is enormous, and that's what hits you, you know.

The mine covers a huge amount of territory.

And then you see the mining trucks are many stories high.

They carry 240 tons of iron ore at a time.

We actually got to sit in the cab of one.

The size of everything is extraordinary.

But what gets you, I think, is the automation.

Yeah.

all these trucks endlessly 24 hours driving around the mine site, they're all automated.

No one's in them.

The two kilometre long iron ore train, yes, two kilometres long, no one's driving that.

It's all controlled from a control centre back in Perth.

So the number of actual people on the mine site is fairly limited.

You know, there's lots of people doing inspections and making sure all this automation works and runs and

stays on track but um it's a fleet of robots doing a lot of the heavy lifting but it was just you know just amazing to get that sense of you know the red dust is everywhere you cannot lean on a on a fence without getting covered in red dust and the conditions are harsh even that idea of flying into work a couple of hours there a couple of hours back

It's a huge logistical challenge.

I mean, mining's sort of about digging rocks.

It's more about moving materials and people around the country.

And this is one of 18 mines that Rio has in the Pilbara.