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With the winter approaching rapidly CN Rail is looking at a lot of movement coming as winter approaches the prairies.
With plenty of grain left in prairie bins following the harvest, CN Rail will be moving quite a bit of that to buyers over the coming months.
Assistant Vice President of Grain at CN Rail David Przednoweck says that they've been seeing a lot of movement over the previous two weeks.
"Things have been running hard here, especially over the past couple of weeks. If we go back to grain shipment week 10, which is the week of October six, CN set an all-time Canadian record for the most grain and processed grain product shipped in a single week ever. We hit almost 838,000 metric tons. The previous record was around 810,000 metric tons, set a number of years ago. Everything clicked, that week had really good terminal performance, all that good stuff, and it was all of the components of the end-to-end supply chain clicking at the same time, which is what you need to hit a number like that."
Unfortunately, their record week was then followed up by one marred by disaster on the western coast.
"Now going into grain shipment week 11, that was the week of October 13th. You'll remember from the news reports last weekend that a really wicked atmospheric river event nailed southern British Columbia. This was like a one-in-100-year type rainfall event, if not more severe. Unfortunately, there was also some loss of life in southern British Columbia as a result of the atmospheric river event."
"That also set grain terminals back that weekend. A lot of lost productivity and a lot of lost unloads because of the impact of the wet weather in the port of Vancouver on grain terminal operations. In fact, we had one grain terminal in the port of Vancouver that really had no activity because they were full over that weekend, so that was a lost opportunity for the supply chain."
Despite the setbacks, Przednoweck says they had a good week with 700,000 metric tons shipped and are well set for the week ahead.
"Overall still a good outcome, but it's a capacity loss that was left on the table that couldn't be utilized because of a factor outside of anybody's control. Well, that affects the end-to-end supply chain. So here we are, we're in grain shipment week 12. Demand for grain movement remains really strong. That's expected to continue here into the fall in the early winter and then I guess pretty soon we're going to be seeing whether Mother Nature is going to be cooperating with us when it comes to winter weather and hopefully that's a long way off."
Przednoweck says that their car fulfillment has been strong, with some good performance over the past couple of weeks.
"Taking a look at things and to qualify it a little bit, I'm going to give you order fulfillment in terms of car orders that CN was able to accept and plan and for grain shipment week 11. We had 98 per cent of orders that we planned that were either spotted in the one week requested or within one to three days of the end of the want week so we're pretty current to demand here."
Orders have been handled well though Przednoweck says the demand is certainly getting high for what they can provide.
"We have had a number of weeks in a row here where we've had demand for CN-supplied hoppers at around the 6500 car mark and that's at a level that the end-to-end supply chain cannot handle, and as such we haven't been able to accept all of the orders that have been placed every Tuesday for the past number of weeks."
While not an immediate problem PRzednoweck says that the atmospheric river event on the west coast showed that Vancouver's ports are in dire need of better efficiency.
"We still have challenges loading grain in the rain in the port of Vancouver. It's an issue that really, really came to the forefront a couple of years ago when terminal productivity in Vancouver was really nailed. After a period of two weeks in the last half of October when the rains were just so persistent, terminals plugging, couldn't take grain, all that stuff. We're sitting here two years later, really in the same situation, and people have to keep in mind that that remains an ongoing chronic problem affecting the overall productivity of the supply chain. So it's an opportunity and hopefully, there's some more resolution on that in the future."