BlueScope Steel is close to making a decision on selling it's thirty year old sea transport - the Iron Monarch - and using rail to haul 650,000 tonnes of hot rolled coil from Port Kembla to Western Port in Victoria each year.
There will certainly be employment consequences. Iron Monarch rotates two seventeen person crews and there will most likely be further retrenchments amongst wharf staff at Port Kembla. A freight volume of this nature will mean more trains, and therefore more rail employment - but overall it will represent a jobs reduction.
What it all boils down to is a cost saving when the two methods of transport are compared - and that cost saving comes in at a whopping one million dollars per month.
There will be howls of protest if this proposal becomes reality, but it is precisely the type of fine tuning that Australian industry needs to make if it is going to survive in this cut throat competitive world - and it may cause a chain reaction of decisions further down the track.
One of those could be the completion of the half built Maldon-Dombarton rail link between the Illawarra and western Sydney. The existing main line - constructed in the pick and shovel, horse and cart era is struggling to accommodate the mix of commuter and freight traffic and it is hard to see how it can handle further enlargement.
The only way to free up space for passenger traffic is to decrease freight traffic, and to do that we need an alternative line to Sydney. Perhaps that hot rolled coil inclusion is just the ticket to tip Maldon-Dombarton into economic reality.
It is easy to lament what we seem to be losing, without taking into account what we stand a chance of gaining. Any business that has the opportunity to cut a million dollars a month from outgoing expenses and fails to do so - is not really in the business of surviving !
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