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September was a record month for CN when it comes to grain movement in Western Canada.
CN's Vice President of Grain David Przednowek is pleased with the numbers considering they are still working out some of the kinks from the Grain Workers Strike at the Port of Vancouver.
"In spite of the grain workers strike that was on from the 24th to the 27th of September, and in spite of the fact that we didn't have the Port of Thunder Bay is now let effectively for the first 8 days of the month. As we worked on recovering from the bridge outage on the Fort Francis Sub, we still managed to hit a record. Grain movement on the CN grain shipments out of Western Canada's bulk grain and processed grain products, we ended up at 2.82 million metric tons."
He says in grain week 9 they ended up moving about 650,000 tonnes, whereas the previous three weeks they were over 700,000 tonnes.
"Now, why is that? Well, when you reduce terminal throughput and activity, you're not unloading as many rail cars as you typically would in a normal day, right? So now the end is holding trains back that are loaded back in the country, or they're staged along the route. The longer those cars sit and can't advance, well it's going to effect how many empty hopper cars you can get back into the country for the next week's load."
He notes its important to realize that the strike had an impact on the end to end supply chain capacity and overall grain order fulfillment.