Ann: Aurizon secures major national freight contract, page-154

Given repeated flooding every few months on the super important Port Augusta to Kalgoorlie section of the vital east-west Trans Australia Railway, works to mitigate flooding need to occur.

This wouldn't be cheap but the Australian Rail Track Corporation, a Federal Government 'business enterprise', has not done anything to reduce or eliminate these occasional walls of water.

No doubt it lacks funding, but since far more freight for WOW/COL/MTS' IGAs/Aldi/Bunnings/MTS' Mitre 10, MYR and a huge range of other retailers is carried to and from Perth by rail than by expensive, inefficient, labour intensive and highly polluting road transport or unreliable, delay-prone and foreign-flagged and staffed coastal shipping, it ought receive some monies to address the most likely problem areas.

It isn't good enough that Perth and other Western Australian retailers experience low stock levels seemingly at least once a year, but recently more often when very heavy rainfall cascades down. In the latest example even the Eyre Highway that's a lot further south than the Nullarbor rail line was briefly closed.Perth is the most isolated capital city worldwide and is growing fairly fast thanks to mineral-rich WA, even if the iron ore price is not what it was. It can't be running out of supermarket goods from supply chain problems as has recently occurred.

AZJ already faces a battle over time to ensure its newly reintroduced intermodal (container) trains from Sydney and Melbourne to Perth and Brisbane return a NPAT, not easy given low margins. A 20 day closure of this high volume rail route was most unhelpful towards this eventual, difficult to achieve aim.