Tag Archives: Port Hedland

As I note on Monday, the city of Port Hedland owes its existence to a natural deep anchorage harbor and its close proximity to iron mines in the Pilbara region of Australia. Today we’re going to look at the actual Port of Port Hedland, which is the busiest commercial port in all of Australia. Of course, any busy port requires control, and here is a view of the new Port of Port Hedland Control Tower:

Working hand-in-hand with the controllers in the tower would of course be the harbor pilots:

Below is the facility that transfers raw iron ore from truck and trains onto the ships. You can see red ore dust coating the entire facility.

As for truck movement in Australia, below I have an image depicting two of Australia’s infamous Road Trains. The road train in the foreground is a massive quad-train:

It’s easy to tell if a freighter is awaiting loading, or if it’s full and ready to depart. Just glance at the waterline (the demarcation between red and black seen below) and see how high the ship rides:

If a ship is really empty, you’ll even see the rudder protruding above the surface:

One final image from this working port. Here’s a tugboat assisting a large freighter as it exits the harbor for open seas:

Radiance of the Seas arrived into Port Hedland on February 22 of this year. This was the smallest destination, population-wise, of our entire trip. But small does not equate to uninteresting. This is quite the busy port, and the port itself is a huge operation even if the town itself is small.

The primary export from this port is iron ore, and over 515 million tonnes/568 million U.S. tons of ore were shipped from here in 2019. Another export is salt derived from evaporated seawater.

This port is so busy that even has its own control tower to direct traffic . . . just not the type of control tower in which I used to work.

That’s the new control tower pictured above. Here’s a neat video of the toppling of the old control tower back in October, 2019 (too bad we missed that by four months):

We took a free shuttle from the port into Port Hedland, and we were greeted warmly by everyone whom we met. Offloading from the bus local scout troopers even offered us cool, refreshing bottle water at no charge. That was quite welcome, for as you can see in the lead photograph above the high temperature was projected to reach 34ºC/93ºF, and that was with stifling humidity.

One friendly conversationalist whom we encountered was a fellow selling some lovely handmade pens and rings made from indigenous woods. Some of these are the perfect pen for the firearms enthusiast in your life, as they are bolt-action and have the profile of a shouldered rifle bullet. I’d seen similar pens previously on our trip, but these were better made. If you’re interested, visit this chap’s business at PilbaraPens.com and tell him I sent you (no, I’m not getting a kickback; I just like this guy and his wares). And, yes, I picked up a lovely bolt-action pen made from burled Australian red gum (eculyptus).

When we first passed this statue below I thought it was a tribute to local area mining. In researching this article I found it has a much more interesting origin. This statue represents the now defunct Black Rock Stakes wheelbarrow race. During its 40-year history, contestants would at night push 11 kilograms/24.25 pounds of iron ore in a relay race stretching 120 kilometers/75 miles. To up the degree of difficulty, the relay racers would hand off the special racing wheelbarrows to teammates who jumped from a sideboard mounted onto a moving vehicle . . . in the dead of night!

If you’re having trouble imagining all that, here’s a photo I found:

The following two images are of some of the artwork decorating Leap Park near Port Hedland’s downtown area:

Finally for today, let’s go back to revisit the Silver Star Café pictured above, but closer up this time. This I found fascinating. Even more so now that I’ve had time to research it for this article. The Silver Star Café is contained within the Silver Star railroad car built in 1939. It was originally a diner/observation car running on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and it ran specifically with the General Pershing Zephyr streamliner. The Silver Star railroad car found its way to Hedland in 1974, where it was presented to the Mount Newman Railway to commemorate the first 100 milli0n tonnes of iron ore moved between the mining town of Newman and Port Hedland.