Tuesday, February 9, 2010.

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I'm Shannon de Ryhove.

Making headlines today:

Aim-listed Chromex Mining has restarted mining at its Stellite opencast chrome mine in South Africa.

The company says that improved pricing and chrome market conditions have led to the drawdown of its run-of-mine (ROM) stockpiles in the past six months, prompting it to restart mining.

Last year, mining had been halted to allow the existing stockpiles to be used up during the commissioning of the processing plant at the mine.

The Stellite mine, which is situated on the western limb of the Bushveld Complex, will initially restart at about 20 000-tons a month of ROM, which will increase to 40 000-tons a month of ROM when a dense-media separation circuit is installed at the beneficiation plant by the third quarter of this year.

A key rail line in Australia's major coking coal region has been partially reopened after a train derailment shut it for nearly a week.

Rail operator Queensland Rail says that one of the two tracks of the Blackwater coal system, which is used to haul coal from mines owned by Xstrata Coal, Felix Resources and Rio Tinto Coal Australia to ports, was opened late on Monday after repairs.

Repair work for the second track is continuing and the company expects to resume operations on both tracks by Friday.

Also making headlines:

Emerging Australian gold explorer Matrix Gold will fast track the Central Victoria gold project.
The Canadian Auto Workers union wants the government to investigate whether Xstrata has good enough reasons for closing its Kidd metallurgical site.
Randgold Resources says that the economic woes of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain could boost gold.
And, Great Basin Gold confirms that the Burnstone mine does employ local workers.

That's a round up of news making headlines today. For more on these and other stories please visit miningweekly.com.