BHP iron ore train derails at Mooka rail yard in the Pilbara, sources say

A train has derailed at BHP’s Mooka rail yard — the heart of the Big Australian’s sprawling Pilbara transport network.

A BHP spokesman said a wagon came off the tracks “at low speed” and a second was “partially derailed” during a shunting exercise at the Mooka yard, just south of Port Hedland.

“The safety controls we have in place meant nobody was in the area at the time,” he said.

The Nightly understands the incident occurred due to a track switch malfunction while shunting was taking place in the marshalling area of the yard.

Shunting is the process of moving different parts of a train around, such as attaching or detaching wagons to a locomotive.

It is understood both de-railed BHP wagons are still upright and they were not laden with iron ore at the time. The ongoing impacts to the rail yard are not clear.

The accident was said to have occurred in the early hours of Wednesday morning and The Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator is aware of the incident.

The Mooka yard consists of five roads on the west side of the line and is spread over a length of almost 10km. On the east side of the line is the Mooka ore car repair shop.

BHP says the repair shop is a “high-tech, semi-automated production line, designed to safely conduct highly repetitive activities” involved in maintenance of ore cars.

Mooka services BHP’s huge rail fleet which is responsible for hauling more than 300 million tonnes of iron ore to port in WA each year.

BHP has said it controls more than 1300km of track with 180 locomotives and more than 10,000 ore cars split up across more than 35 trains across the Pilbara network.

The derailment is the second in WA so far this year, but appears to be less severe than the first bungle.

In May Rio Tinto train laden with iron ore was ripped off the tracks after smashing into stationary wagons that had workers nearby.

That autonomous train was derailed about 80 kilometres outside Karratha when it collided with a set of stationary wagons “impacting 22 wagons and three locomotives”, according to Rio Tinto. The crash marked Rio’s third driverless derailment in the space of 12 months.

On the second last day of 2023 scorching heat buckled a Fortescue track leading to a derailment that severed both lines of its rail network for four days. Like Rio’s May derailment the train carnage caused a material dent on export numbers.

But BHP suffered the most infamous derailment when in 2018 it was forced to derail a runaway train after maintenance workers accidentally applied brakes to the wrong locomotive.

The train travelled for 92kms throughout the Pilbara without a driver before it was derailed 120km south of Port Hedland, destroying 268 wagons of ore in the process and leaving BHP’s coffers lighter by hundreds of millions of dollars.