Rail is making a comeback, even below ground.

Nordic Mine Technology, a North Bay mining supply designer and manufacturer, is going global with their high-speed underground hauling and unloading systems.

Nordic and its parent company, Minesteel Fabricators Ltd., are very protective of the shared premises on Highway 11, north of the city.

Like any outfit in the ultra-competitive mining supply sector, every manufacturing process and technology produced is highly proprietary. Posted signs warn against any unauthorized photography and video.

The company has a fully automated material-handling system that can quickly load and unload ore from mine cars.

In September, the back lot of their shop resembled a railway yard with a full-sized locomotive shuttling a string of 20 mine cars back and forth on a curving one kilometre-long track.

Workers began laying track last April to perform test the system for their Swedish mining client, LKAB.

A complete train of mine cars, chute and unloading system is on display, most of which is destined for LKAB's Kiruna Mine in northern Sweden.

“We're trying to push it to the next level,” said Phillip Brown, Nordic's business development manager.

During a September testing phase for the client, the mine cars, both fully-loaded and empty, were wired up and put through a battery of braking and acceleration tests. Stresses on the buckets, car axles and couplers were measured as rock was dumped in.

Large 60-tonne capacity cars are rolled under a specially-built hydraulic chute where ore drops into each bucket. The cars are hinged together with a protruding lip at the top to avoid spillage. Then the train is hauled over and channeled into an unloading station.

Large specialized propulsion devices on each side of the station help propel the cars through. The ore drops out the car's bottom.

The entire underground loading system is capable of being joystick controlled by an operator on surface observing with a series of cameras and track sensors. The unloading system is completely automated with no operator required.

Nordic has been designing these systems since the 1980s when it was a stand-alone company based in Markham. All the manufacturing of the mine cars, chutes and unloading stations were already being done by Minesteel in North Bay.

When Ron Elliott, who is president of both companies, bought Nordic in 2006, the acquisition was merely a formal hand-off of the technology and intellectual property.

Elliott first met Nordic president Eric Nylund years before when he worked for mine contractors J.S. Redpath.

Minesteel's specialty is in the vertical movement of ore by designing and installing mine headframes, shafts, chutes, conveyors, skips and cages. With 65 employees, the company does all its own design, research and development with a full engineering team.

"By acquiring Nordic Mine, it gave us the horizontal transportation of ore," said Elliott. "Now we can complete the circuit."

Smaller Nordic systems have been installed around the world, including two at the Vale Inco mines in Sudbury and Thompson, Man.

The LKAB Kiruna mine in Sweden have had automated underground rail haulage for the last 30 years. The other large scale, automated, rail haulage system is at BHP Billiton's mammoth Olympic Dam Mine in Australia and soon-to-be at Kiruna, where Nordic Mine has a system in place.

"We're working on a few large projects of this scale where we're doing new mines and complete systems," in different parts of the world, said Brown.

The weak economy has slowed down the fabrication on these projects, but their global prospects look good.

"Moving into the future, 75 per cent of our systems are going to be international," said Elliott. "There's a couple we're working on in Canada and North America, but the bulk of what's on the horizon for the next few years is going to be overseas."

But they don't intend to ignore their backyard.

"The rest of Canada is on our radar as the economy starts to swing rebound," said Brown.

The company has been made trips to manufacturing trade shows in Alberta as part of a local oil sands marketing initiative, though with few bites.

The company is also the North American manufacturer and distributor for Clayton Equipment, a British maker of battery, trolley and diesel-powered locomotives.

Elliott wants to convince the big miners to choose rail over rubber tire for its energy efficiency, low operational and maintenance costs, ability to move more tonnes faster and to work deeper without the needed for expensive ventilation.

"Ninety to ninety-five per cent of the time, the most economic and efficient way to do it is with high-speed rail haulage."

Elliott said this system could be adapted to any kind of bulk material such as coal or slurry concentrate and for operations like open pit mines.