CN BEGS TO DIFFER
Rail firm tells farmers it is performing.
Contrary to complaints from several farm groups, CN says it’s on a “record-setting pace’’ in terms of grain deliveries more than halfway through the crop year. Seven months into the 201415 crop year, CN has moved on average 4,700 grain hoppers weekly in Western Canada — 21 per cent more than during the same period of the record crop year of 2013-14, the Montreal-based railway said Wednesday.
The grain backlog caused by the record 77 milliontonne crop of 2013-4 is estimated to have cost western farmers $5.1 billion.
CN also takes issue with the Ag Transport Coalition’s contention that CN is failing to meet demand, claiming its wait list stands at less than 2,000 orders, “just a few days’ worth of car supply.’’
“Contrary to claims recently made by the new Ag Transport Coalition that CN is somehow failing to meet demand, we know we’re responding very efficiently to all the demand from our customers,” said Claude Mongeau, CN’s president and chief executive officer.
Last week marked one year since the federal government imposed minimum grain-hauling requirements on the two major railways. Since then, CN’s cumulative tonnage of Western grain has exceeded its mandated volumes by close to 2.5 million tonnes, or 10 per cent, the company said.
Mongeau added that minimum mandates were unnecessary to move record grain volumes and contends the order-in-council should not be renewed when it expires on March 28.
Kevin Hursh, spokesman for the Ag Transport Coalition, which represents grain shippers, agreed that CN is doing a better job than CP, but both railways could do better.
“CN is certainly performing better than CP and if you remove rejected cars, railway cancellations, shorted supply and denied orders from the equation, CN’s numbers and the Ag Transport Coalition’s numbers aren’t that far apart,” said Hursh, who represents the Inland Terminal Association of Canada on the coalition.
But he said shippers are still receiving fewer than half the hopper cars ordered for any given week. “Shippers aren’t getting all the cars they’re ordering and they certainly aren’t getting them in the week required to meet sales commitments. The system isn’t in crisis like it was a year ago, but it isn’t meeting demand,’’ Hursh added.
As of Feb. 14, CN and CP supplied 2,111 or 29 per cent of the 7,304 hopper cars ordered for delivery, representing a shortfall of 5,193 cars for the week, said Ag Transport Coalition’s weekly performance report issued Tuesday. ■ For the crop year to date, railways have supplied 43 per cent of customer orders during the week in which the cars were ordered, the coalition said. Through the first 28 weeks of the current crop year, railways have failed to supply 22,884 hopper cars ordered by shippers, a shortfall of 11 per cent of shipper demand.