Courtesy of Mish.
Train drivers working for Australian miner Rio Tinto make as much as A$240K (US$224K) per year to haul ore. According to BLS data, that is as much as surgeons in the US, and more than the $151K average of New York State lawyers.
Does that pay schedule make any sense? I do not think so, nor does Rio Tinto.
When costs are ridiculous, companies seek ways to lower them. Thus, the following Bloomberg headline should not be surprising: Rio Replacing Train Drivers Paid Like U.S. Surgeons
The 400-plus workers in the remote Pilbara region who earn about A$240,000 ($224,000) a year probably are the highest-paid train drivers in the world, according to U.K.-based transport historian Christian Wolmar. Australia’s decade-long mining boom has sucked up skilled workers, raising wages for engineers to drivers at Rio, the second-largest exporter of the mineral, and its closest competitors, Vale SA (VALE) and BHP Billiton Ltd.
Rio, which last year approved spending of $7.2 billion to expand the iron ore operations, is aiming to have the world’s first, fully automated, long-distance and heavy-haul rail system operating in 2015. Its automated rail will have 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) of track, 10,000 wagons and individual train sets 2.3 kilometers long, according to Credit Suisse Group AG. The company is spending $518 million on the program that was announced last year.
“You need to have quite a significant amount of scale” in fleet and volumes to benefit from automation technology, said Evy Hambro, manager of BlackRock Inc. (BLK)’s $7.7 billion World Mining Fund.
Laser Detectors
Rio’s rail, port and truck movements are all watched over from a control center in the Western Australia state capital of Perth, 1,500 kilometers to the southeast, that has about 250 controllers working three shifts a day. The rail automation is part of the company’s push to use technology to improve productivity and safety and wring out extra capacity from existing assets, Simon Prebble, general manager for Rio’s automated trains project, said in an interview yesterday.
The trains have on-board systems that check speed, signals and operate the brake, Prebble said. Rio has installed a new radio-based network to communicate with the trains as well as close-circuit television at every public level crossing, he said. “We also have an obstruction detection system which uses laser scanners to continually look for any obstructions.”
Never Has Arrived
Why stop with train drivers? So, what about trucks?
For those who said truck drivers would never be replaced by robots, it appears “never has arrived” because Rio is also going to automate trucking.
From Bloomberg …. …
