Rio Tinto finds success in its autonomous freight-train operation
9/26/2023
By Julie Sneider, Senior Associate Editor
While U.S. rail and labor leaders continue to debate whether autonomous (driverless) freight trains would or could operate safely in the United States — labor says ‘no,’ railroads say ‘yes’ — global mining company Rio Tinto began using AutoHaul™, the world’s first fully autonomous heavy haul railway system, in 2018.
Through a partnership with Hitachi Rail, Rio Tinto’s use of autonomous train technology in the Pilbara region in northwest Australia has helped the mining company reduce safety risks and improve productivity. Last week, two Rio Tinto officials — Carmela Mucciolo, superintendent of testing and deployment–AutoHaul rail engineering and strategy; and Jessica Mitchell, control system engineer on the AutoHaul team — explained to attendees of a League of Railway Women-hosted webinar how and why the company transitioned to autonomous heavy-haul rail for its iron ore operations.
Rio Tinto’s Pilbara region operations include 10,000 employees, 17 mines, four ports, three power stations, a network of 1,900 kilometers of track, 57 trains, 221 locomotives, 13,000 rail cars, eight rail-car dumpers, two rail yards and one integrated operations center. In 2022, the company transported more than 320 million tonnes of iron ore by rail, according to Mucciolo.
In July 2018, the company delivered the first shipment of iron ore by an autonomous train. Consisting of three locomotives and carrying about 28,000 tonnes of iron ore, the AutoHaul train traveled over 280 kilometers from the mine in Tom Price to the port of Cape Lambert. On its journey, the train was monitored by operators stationed at Rio Tinto’s Operations Center in Perth, Mucciolo said. In June 2019, the AutoHaul project became fully operational.
AutoHaul didn’t happen overnight, Mucciolo told the webinar attendees. The journey began in the early 2000s with a vision and a prototype. Unfortunately, the global recession of 2008-09 prompted the company to shelve ongoing plans.
Piles of iron ore at Rio Tinto’s mining operations in the Pilbara region of western Australia. riotinto.com“But our vision didn’t stop; we really wanted to go autonomous,” Mucciolo said, adding that the company secured a partnership with Ansaldo STS, now Hitachi Rail, in 2012 to restart the project. Working with Hitachi Rail, the company started by upgrading its rolling stock with new technology. All locomotives were fitted with new safety technology including collision detection systems; automatic train protection technology that controls train speed to ensure adherence to speed limits; onboard video cameras to record the front view from the train; and on-board cameras allowing for constant monitoring from the operations center in Perth. All public grade crossings on the network were fitted with CCTV cameras. There are 42 such crossings on the region’s rail network.
At the operations center in Perth, a train controller sets the trip route, then computers at the center and onboard the locomotives take over and operate the train.
It was a challenge to implement such a technically complex project in a short period of time, Mucciolo said. Once the project was developed, it was completed in phases. For a while, the legacy train system and AutoHaul were run as parallel systems, as drivers’ control over the trains and routes evolved to the automated systems.
News reports at the time cited the company’s cost to develop AutoHaul at nearly $1 billion in U.S. dollars.
Mucciolo acknowledged that not all railroads can afford full automation. Still, there are “incremental” benefits that railroads could tap into via the technology and subsystems developed for Rio Tinto’s AutoHaul, she said.
Since July 2018, AutoHaul has operated over more than 33 million kilometers — over 20.5 million miles — with over 98% of missions arriving at their destination even if an incident occurred that stopped the train on its way, according to Mucciolo.
The main drivers behind the AutoHaul initiative were to improve productivity and lower safety risks, Mucciolo said. For example, the cycle time for a train to travel from the port to the mine and back is 56 hours. Because a train driver’s shift is 12 hours, next-shift drivers had to travel along the route in motor vehicles to relieve drivers whose shifts were ending.
“It was very stressful and complicated to manage the changeover between the drivers,” Mucciolo said. “There was a lot of driving involved, which causes a lot of fatigue. Also, driving in that type of environment is very dangerous. So, with people at our heart, we thought that their safety was the primary concern.”
The autonomous system also has been a time-saver. In the manual system, every time one driver ended a shift, the train had to stop. By becoming autonomous, the rail system eliminated the need to transport drivers 1.5 million kilometers per year to and from trains as they changed shifts, according to the company.
Although the transition reduced safety risks for drivers, the AutoHaul project development caused anxiety among the rail workforce, company officials have acknowledged.
“At the beginning of the project, no one believed it would work out,” Mucciolo said. “There was discomfort [among workers] when explaining the changes and what it would mean for the drivers.”
The company kept most of its drivers, but their role has changed since AutoHaul began.
“Their role has evolved into new skill sets, from driving the train to being a technician who can make the system work again” if something goes wrong on the route, she said. At the same time, they need to maintain their skills for driving the trains manually. One challenge in the process has been helping drivers maintain those manual train-driving skills while learning and using new technical skills.
“When you have a project as complex as this one, people must be your first goal,” Mucciolo said. “You need to understand that as their role changes, they need to be aware of the change and embrace it or the operation won’t work.”
After the introduction of AutoHaul, the company has provided a lot of training in classrooms, on the job and via the web to learn and maintain both skill sets, she said.
Rio Tinto continues to explore new forms of technology to make AutoHaul safer and more productive, and to help the company reach its decarbonization goals, said AutoHaul system engineer Mitchell. Rio Tinto is aiming to reduce its own Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
“How do we do that with a completely diesel operation? AutoHaul helped with a reduction in cycle time, but it’s not enough to meet our targets,” Mitchell said. “So, we are looking at biofuels and battery electric locomotives to help meet our goals.”
In early 2022, Rio Tinto announced it had purchased four 7MWh FLXDrive battery-electric locomotives from Wabtec Corp., with production due to begin in the United States in 2023 ahead of initial trials in Pilbara in early 2024. Once delivered, the locomotives will be used on a trial basis within controlled environments. They’ll be tested against a range of safety and functional criteria, including integration with AutoHaul, Rio Tinto officials said in a press release.
The end goal is to have solutions for decarbonization applied across the company’s entire supply chain, Mitchell said.
“We believe the future of mining is bright — and particularly in rail,” she added.
