Bundaberg Sugar - Australia

The Customer

Each crushing season in Queensland, Australia around 1,300 mechanical cane harvesters cut approximately 35 million tonnes of cane from
about 440,000 hectares. Cane is delivered either by cane railway or road to 25 sugar mills. Bundaberg Sugar is Queensland's largest cane grower and also owns and operates sugar mills. It is part of the Belgium based sugar group Finasucre Saw.

The Challenge

An efficient communications system is required to track and manage the complex cane rail network operated by Bundaberg Sugar. Traffic controllers at Bundaberg Sugar are using a Tait system to optimise the delivery of empty cane wagons to harvest pick-up points and the return of full wagons to its three mills.

Prior to the system being introduced there had been two major collisions on the network - one involving a locomotive and the other a vehicle. The system was initially installed to provide greater safety and it has also reduced voice traffic across the company's radio network by 30 to 40 per cent.

The Solution

All 30 Bundaberg Cane locomotives are fitted with Tait mobiles, modems and GPS equipment. Tait radios in the central offi ce are used as polling radios to request information from the mobiles in the locomotives.

Four times every minute - on instruction from the computer driving the system in the traffi c control centre - the base radio initiates a group data call requesting the identity, GPS position, speed and bearing of all 30 locomotives.

This information is processed by the system software and is overlaid on to maps of the cane rail network, providing a constantly updated list to the
traffi c control operators.

Geonautics International Pty Ltd developed the software used by Bundaberg Sugar specifically for Tait. Bundaberg Sugar has longer term plans to capture a range of data which will help produce efficiencies in what is one of sugar milling's highest cost centres.