Traveling New Ground

A New Haulage System May Revolutionize Mining

Rail-Veyor, a new mining technology company in Sudbury, Ontario, may soon be able to eliminate two of the costliest and dirtiest things about digging underground mines. One is the vertical hoist which takes the miners up and down each day. The other is the twisting tunnel through which trucks and bulky machinery must pass, in order to dig gold or potash and haul it to the surface.

A Rail-Veyor train carries a load around a curve.

What will Rail-Veyor use to replace the hoists and tunnels? A train car, of not more than ten feet high and twelve feet wide, with a long line of trough-shaped cars which turn very tight corners. Each car is open at both ends, with a urethane flap covering the openings, so that a hopper continuously dumps ore into the moving train until it's as packed full. Then, in the above-ground demonstration project now running in Sudbury, the train follows the track over a 90-degree drop-off, where it dumps its cargo into a hopper, and is then conveyed, upside-down, towards a re-inversion loop where it flips itself upright and proceeds back onto the main track.

A Rail-Veyor train dumps its cargo into a hopper.

The train is fully automated, with fixed electric motors, called drive stations, located at intervals along the track. Each has two conventional truck tires, set horizontally on each side of the track, so that they push against flat plates on the side of the train and propel it toward the next drive station. They can also stop it where necessary. The train will always be grasped by at least one drive station., When travelling up the incline at the demonstration site, several drive stations power up sequentially to propel the train up the twenty per cent incline with ease.

"It has the potential to double the development speed to get to an ore body," says Rail-Veyor's Joe Einarson, a marketer who came to the company after 20 years at the high-technology, engineering group Sandvik. He feels he has stumbled into a marketing man's dream of paradise, delightedly describing the system as Hot Wheels Technology, in a tribute to its deceptively toy-like appearance. With no human driver, its tunnel needs "less ventilation, and it's close to one-third the size" of a conventional tunnel. Miners working underground need no longer worry about huge trucks "running up and down ramps and the associated risks."

CEO Mike Romaniuk, formerly a project manager for the mining group Xstrata, heard about the technology through an acquaintance in Sudbury named Risto Laamanen who had sought the rights from its Florida inventor. After Laamanen's death "his family was trying to think what to do with the technology," says Romaniuk. He helped the company secure the global rights 17 months ago and became a CEO for the first time in his life. The Laamanen family continues to be a majority owner and is fully supportive of the global vision for the company.

"We're going to be growing into a large company," Romaniuk says with confidence. "Based in Sudbury, because we love northern Ontario, but big. We'll have a brand presence, and the patents, and the trademarking. The technology, the skill set, the personnel."

Rail-Veyor has an important partnership with Brazilian mining giant Vale, which is building the first underground Rail-Veyor system in North America as part of a $3.4-billion investment in its Sudbury mining project. It's called the 114 Orebody Demonstration Plant, to be completed early in 2013. Romaniuk sees it as essential to "the commercialization of the technology in underground mines on a global basis."

The company is cautious about discussing contracts which are still under negotiation, but acknowledges several big potential projects, located around the globe in places like the United States, Indonesia and Australia.

For Joe Einarson, a big plus in marketing the system is its light environmental footprint. The fixed drive stations only 'wake up' and use electricity when a train passes between their drive wheels, and in one potential overseas project the system will produce more power than necessary. "They're looking at putting it into the grid to power a village in a rain forest."

In the near-term he also foresees above-ground systems running through small culverts under highways, and wiggling around protected forests or ecological zones rather than punching through them. "Miners have to be better about greenhouse gases," he says.

Like Romaniuk, he also emphasizes that the electronics and some of the materials which make Rail-Veyor possible did not exist five years ago. Technological nimbleness has brought its product first into the marketplace.

"I'm excited about this," says Romaniuk. He points out that in seventeen months "we've gone from zero to twenty people and established an international presence. Material handling is difficult, but our technology is ideal. We're only a year or two away from tackling the oil sands effectively."

Mining Equipment and Services in Ontario

Over the past 120 years, Ontario, Canada, has developed one of the world's safest, most productive, technologically advanced and environmentally sound mining industries - which has spurred the growth of our mining equipment and services sector.

Today, more than 1,000 innovative Ontario companies are supplying the latest in mining methods, technologies and products to global markets. Their capabilities include:

• exploration research
• mine planning, design and development
• automation and telerobotics
• underground communication and data transmission networks
• design and development of mining equipment
• environmental studies and mine site reclamation
• deep mining
• risk management and safety.