Building a Ring of Fire railroad to move millions of bulk tonnes of chromite is a certainty, said a senior official with Cliffs Natural Resources.

Bill Boor, Cliffs' senior vice-president of global ferroalloys, who is overseeing the Ohio miner's project development in the James Bay lowlands, said rail is an inevitability as more mines come onstream in the remote district.

In last winter's base case for its high grade Black Thor chromite deposit, Cliffs proposed a permanent year-round haul road between the mine site and railway connections near Nakina in northwestern Ontario.

But Boor clarified that one mine alone doesn't support the investment of a railroad.

However, establishing a transportation corridor will improve the economics of other nearby deposits. Once that “scale” is built up, Boor said, “the right answer is to put a railroad in place.

“We just see it as a phased development.”

KWG Resources, a junior miner in the Ring of Fire chromite play, is making some bold moves in setting the tone for development in the Far North.

Though KWG is a junior partner to Cliffs Natural Resources on its Big Daddy deposit, where it claims a 28 per cent stake, the small Montreal-based company wants to tap into a federal infrastructure program to help build a $2-billion ore haul railroad.

On high ground staked by KWG through the swamps of the James Bay country, the proposed 300-plus kilometre route would link up with the Canadian National Railway (CN) main line at Exton, west of Nakina.

Through its subsidiary, Canada Chrome Corp., KWG has applied to Ontario regulators for a licence to operate a shortline railway.

The north-south rail corridor is acknowledged by both KWG and Cliffs as the most direct and economically-efficient operation possible.

To conduct the railroad engineering studies, KWG hired Krech Ojard, a Duluth, Minn-based firm that's well-known to Cliffs as a long-term partner on other mining projects.

Although the two companies differ on what deposit should be developed first, Boor said Cliffs favours a route similar to what KWG is advocating, and doesn't see a lot of conflict in their respective plans.

“We're not directly involved with KWG's route,” said Boor, “but we feel very good about involvement of Krech Ojard and we think they're doing good engineering. It's a matter of when can that development can be justified?”

“We really don't disagree with them. I like the vision and I think our two plans have a lot more in common than people might initially think.”

KWG is teaming up with the Greenstone Economic Development Corporation – the municipality where Nakina is located – in filing an application with the P3 Canada Fund to pay for the quarter of the estimated $1.98 billion railroad project.

P3 Canada is a $1.2 billion federal infrastructure fund which provides up to 25 per cent of capital project costs.