The purpose of this study is to investigate and identify the waste from the unloading station of mineral cars using the lean thinking approach. In this paper, one of the largest steel producers is investigated as a case study. The time information was collected from the database system of the factory and railway company from April to July 2017. The wastes were identified by using the value stream map, and to reduce the waste, ten solutions have been proposed based on the changes in: (a) operation management; (b) purchase of new equipment; and (c) infrastructure development. Implementation of solutions using the Planimate simulator software shows that the best strategy consists of a combination of three operational management solutions without having to purchase new equipment and without any infrastructure development, which can improve station performance by up to 52% with regards to the total time for the unloading process. In addition, the valuable time of the whole process has been increased from 9 to 19%. This improvement will result in an increase of 21% in the annual turnover of cars to the station destination. As a result, each car annually carries on average 450 tons more freight, in which case the railway’s revenues from carrying iron ore would be increased by 24% for this destination.

This paper aims to identify and evaluate the bottlenecks and wastes in the loading, unloading, and in-transit processes of iron ore railcars using simulation. A field survey was conducted in one of the largest steel factories and a mine, and each process time was extracted using the work-study and time-study methods. The data for more than 34 thousand railcars were collected from the database of the steel company, Iran Rail Transport company, and a private rail transport company. Seven scenarios have been developed according to (a) operations management, (b) equipment procurement, and (c) infrastructure development. It was found that utilization of the automated loading system would improve performance by 20%. This causes a 24% increase in railcars’ turnover, which means obtaining US$10,000 additional income per railcar. It was expected, it would improve performance. Conversely, adding a railcar tippler and developing the tracks reduces performance.

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