Saturday 14 July 2018

Western Creek area.

Originally the Robe River line crossed over the Hamersley Iron line by means of an overbridge at the 75.4 km on the Tom Price (HI) line and 73 km on the Deepdale (RR) line. And it stayed like this from the time Robe River started operations in 1972 until 2002 after both companies merged their assets and an interconnecting line was built to allow traffic to operate between Cape Lambert and the new West Angelas mine that Robe River were developing.

The first interconnecting line left the Deepdale line near the 71 km grade crossing and diverged to the north before curving southwest and passing under the Robe River line adjacent to the Hamersley Iron at the 75.4 km then curving southeast to cross the Western Creek at the 74.1 km bridge, the Robe track then joined the Tom Price line at Emu Siding, Robe chainage changed from 76.3 to Tom Price chainage of 78.4 km.

And then from 2012 proposals for full duplication of the Cape Lambert to Western Creek line were started and over the coming years completed. This included the new Emu Siding (passing track or loop) of the Deepdale line to emu ended up with four roads, two (original configuration) for the HI Dampier line and the new alignment for the Deepdale duplication. One and two road are for the Deepdale line, and three and four roads are the original end of the Emu duplication on the Dampier line. One and three roads both had a back track and spur.

The Western Creek East Mainline has a crossover to the original Deepdale line at the 71 km. The east line runs along the Deepdale line on the east for a couple of kilometres on a level alignment while the Deepdale line climbs, before curving to the south and crossing the Western Creek on another bridge at the 74.1 km. The east mainline then becomes One Road Emu with a chainage change from 74.886 km to Tom Price chainage 77.062. There is also a crossover from the west mainline which forms Two Road Emu at this location. Both roads then continue to curve towards the Tom Price mainlines where they converge at the 80.21 km for two road onto three road and four road onto the east mainline at 80.5 km.

The attached image has a loaded train departing Emu for Cape Lambert on the original interconnecting road between Emu and Western Creek (Western Creek West Mainline) with the entire train curving back up though the grades from Emu. The closet track is the Tom Price line to Dampier, the track behind is the Western Creek East Mainline to Cape Lambert and the train is on the west mainline.

1 comment:

  1. Comments are copied from original website blog.

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