With lower coal prices, the headwinds are even stronger, but I...

With lower coal prices, the headwinds are even stronger, but I did notice something in the last week or so. A site called Marine Traffic Global shows ship movements all over the world,in detail. The number of bulk ships waiting off Hay Point up to a few weeks ago was around 44. For some reason Abbott Point never seems to have much of a queue. The Hay point/DBCT queue reduced to about 36 a week ago and about 25 late last week.

This drop coincides with the temporary shutdown at the Q Coal Byerwen mine (mine accident/death) just north of Bowen's mines, which ships through Abbott Point. It's a big mine, producing 10m tons a year, which equates to about three or four 100 wagon train loads a day. That capacity may have been temporarily shifted to operators on the Goonyella line to Hay Point, who have quite a lot of buildup of un-shipped coal due to adverse weather events a while back, including BCB with about a month's production sitting at the Mallawa loader, tying up working capital.

Could the drop have been caused by temporary diversion by the rail operator/s of the very substantial capacity from Byerwen hauls, to miners with an unmet need for extra haulage to DBCT, such as BCB? Thus increasing to delivery to port quite a large degree in the last week, thus allowing more DBCT ship loadings ?

A contact in FNQ suggested that a relo. of theirs, who works on the trains, passed on the info that there are real problems with concrete cancer in bridges near the coast on the line to Abbott Point, which is the other end of the Aurizon Goonyella line, which has necessitated shutdown of the line three days each week to work on rectification of what is an important safety issue.

Has BCB been able to ship all or part of its backlog? This would have a very positive effect on critical cash flow for the September quarter, after the (wet coal?) delays in July?