The annual review of the Crop year by Canadian National Railway offers up a glimpse today towards some of the challenges that famers, shippers and the railroad have seen in 2019-20.
Yet despite, extreme weather, labour disputes and tension along the northern rail corridor and the suspension of service owing to blockades, CN has still move a record 28.3 million metric tonnes of bulk grain to terminals in Vancouver and Prince Rupert.
The familiar grain cars transited the Northern mainline into the Prince Rupert Grain yard with consistent frequency into the summer after some challenges in the early part of the year.
However, the use of containerization of grain is ow adding to the shipping options for the railway, which last year saw CN move over 1.15 MMT of bulk grain and processed grain products
ex Western Canada in containers during the 2019–20 crop year,
representing record intermodal grain movement.
The report does however, make note of a string of circumstances that did challenge the railway in 2019-20, included on the list the blockade of the railway near New Hazelton which impacted on delivery to port terminals for a week:
First, exceptionally poor harvest weather delayed grain supply availability and pushed the shipment program further out — September saw the greatest decline in monthly tonnage moved compared to average, and record grain movement in October could not offset the grain shipment volume lost in September. CN experienced an eight‑day labour disruption in November when the TCRC went on strike, leaving the CN Western Canada network operating at 10% of capacity.
Thanks to a well-managed and orderly shutdown of rail operations before the strike occurred, by the second week of December, CN had returned to the peak shipping levels seen in the two weeks preceding the labour disruption, as well as being able to take on all customer demand for CN-supplied hoppers for the balance of December.
Besides the mainline disruption experienced in the Edmonton–Prince Rupert corridor in mid-January, CN experienced serious disruptions on the mainline between Edmonton and Vancouver in late January and early February, when heavy rains washed out sections of track and caused landslides. The Fraser Canyon tunnel was put out of service for five days, leaving this vital section of CN’s network effectively out of action for over a week.
Almost as soon as that disruption was resolved, the CN mainline between Toronto and Montreal saw an illegal blockade lasting over three weeks, quickly followed by a blockade at New Hazelton, BC, which took the Prince Rupert corridor out of action for a week.
The increase of throughput at the Ray-Mont facility on Ridley Island also gets a note in the Annual report, with CN highlighting the Prince Rupert facility as part of a growing grain network expansion, the use of containers making for an innovation that CN is quite enthusiastic about.
While the majority of Canada’s grain exports via intermodal are loaded into export containers at port, grain moving directly out of the Prairies on CN in intermodal containers represents over one million metric tonnes annually, and CN leads this segment of the market by far, both in terms of total tonnage shipped and product innovation.
With global markets on the cusp of a recovery, CN also looks ahead towards the 2020-21 crop year and sees positive trends ahead for the industry.
Now that harvest has begun, there are indications that overall western Canadian grain production has the potential to be the best on record. If the global demand is there to draw these supplies into the market, and assuming that end‑to‑end grain supply chain capacity will be heavily utilized throughout the entire crop year, CN now expects to move 27.5 to 29.5 million MMT of grain from western Canada over the course of the 2020–21 crop year (excluding grain moved directly from western Canada via intermodal), compared to its previous guidance of 26 to 28 MMT.
While the CN Rail report indicates positive results system wide, a year of railway labour disputes, extreme weather issues and blockades have made for some challenges at Prince Rupert Grain.
While July showed an increase from 2019 levels, the latest statistics from the Prince Rupert Port Authority indicate that shipment levels are down on the year to date review so far.
For more notes on CN rail operations across the Northwest
see our archive page here.
A look at past items of interest from the two terminals in Prince Rupert can be explored below:
No comments:
Post a Comment