Queensland rail recovery accelerates but impact still significant

Repairs to Aurizon's coal rail infrastructure in Queensland have progressed more quickly than we initially expected. Three of the four main rail systems are now operating and Aurizon has announced the Goonyella system is due to be re-opened on 26 April, some 1.5 weeks earlier than its initial estimate. However, while the re-opening of rail systems is progressing faster than we anticipated our estimate of the volume reduction as a result of the rail outage remains essentially unchanged. We now estimate a 16.1Mt reduction in throughput, only marginally lower than our original estimate of 16.2Mt. The main reason for this is that we have now factored in a period of reduced capacity for most of the rail systems after re-opening.