Canada’s two major railway companies are returning to normal operations after a labour disruption in late August brought rail shipments to a halt.
Members of the Teamsters Rail union were locked out by their employers on Aug. 22, affecting both the CPKC and CN rail lines. The dispute was resolved later that day with the Minister of Labour’s decision to refer the matter to binding arbitration. The Teamsters union had issued a 72-hour strike notice effective for Sept. 26, which was nullified by the binding arbitration process.
CN Rail Assistant Vice President of Grain, David Przednowek, said they had planned for an orderly shutdown of operations during the work disruption and set the table to ramp up operations quickly again.
Przednowek shared a couple of pieces of data, velocity and grain movement, as benchmarks on where operations are at.
Velocity is the average miles per day that a car can travel across the network. CN’s cars bottomed out at 170 miles per day during the lockout week. Prior to that, the cars were rolling at 205 to 210 miles per day.
“That is a good number. If you are at or above that, it means for the most part things are rolling pretty good,” Przednowek said.
In the last week of reporting, CN was looking at about 223 miles per day as an indicator that things are moving quickly.
For grain movement, CN hauled 569,000 tonnes of grain the week prior to the lockout. During the week of the work disruption, they moved 289,000 tonnes. The two weeks after the lockout, CN moved 522,000 and 533,000 tonnes respectively.
“Between velocity and the grain movements, the amount of workload that we are moving on the network, I think we have recovered really well,” Przednowek said.
One other challenge CN experienced was a drawbridge outage on Aug. 15 in Fort Frances, Ont., that cut off the route to the Port of Thunder Bay.
The bridge collapse left 600 cars stranded at the Port of Thunder Bay that could not move grain. The bridge was also CN’s only way in or out of the port.
“CN worked with customers at the time on moving traffic to alternate destinations like ports in the St. Lawrence, Duluth, we worked with customers on options,” Przednowek explained.
The bridge was back in service as of Sept. 9 and demand has ramped up again at that port.
Przednowek said CN is positioned well for harvest with a larger fleet of hopper cars and high- and mid-horsepower locomotives. He added that mid-to-late September gets stronger year-over-year and a big driver was a quiet start to the grain shipment program into Prince Rupert that didn’t happen this year.
"We are at the peak now. The peak has come about a week or so earlier than it typically does on the CN. You have harvest ramp up as you go south to north so you tend to see the peak on CN a little bit later,” he said.
After October, Przednowek said they will be watching to see what happens with the supply chain with the announcement of China’s anti-dumping investigation into Canadian shipments of canola. He said 1.7 million to 1.9 million tonnes of canola were shipped the past two crop seasons, which could be up in the air.