“The east-west route makes sense if you don’t have huge volumes of material, but it’s a much longer route requiring 282 kilometres of new construction and a total distance of 526 kilometres to get down to Savant Lake – 280 kilometres away from where we’d be if we ended up at Cavell,” said Pavlich.

The east-west route via Pickle Lake to the CN Rail line 280 kilometres west of the Cavell siding was rejected both because of the increased distance and the fact that much of the route – from Pickle Lake onwards – is a paved highway that Cliffs would have to share with existing vehicular traffic.

“It wouldn’t allow us to operate over the road tractors hauling two trailers with 35 tonnes of material in each trailer,” unlike the north-south route, which could be designated as a private road.

The north-south route, he added, would also allow for the use of non-tax fuel.

While the maximum legal Ontario Highway Traffic Act (HTA) gross vehicle weight (GVW) is 70 tonnes or 63,500 kg. The net carry payload, called tare weight, is a little more than 46 tonnes for this size of 9-axle 'B-train' truck.

Cliffs EA proposed using 100 trucks a day with a ~90 tonne GVW, which can not be used on a public road.