West-central Saskatchewan farmers made history recently. In so doing, they sent a message to the railways, the grain companies, governments and anyone else listening: farmers demand a say in how the grain industry evolves.
They sent the message by loading 100 producer cars with No. 1 and 2 durum and sending them off to Thunder Bay.
Some 500 farmers took part in a mass loading of 83 cars Dec. 9 at points from Dinsmore to Glidden. The other cars were loaded earlier in the Beechy-Lucky Lake area.
The effort was organized by a group concerned about the impending loss of the rail line which serves the area.
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The line runs more than 405 km; CN has indicated that it will be closed in stages between now and the year 2000.
Eston, the largest community at which cars were loaded, became the focus of the day. As early as the previous Friday, farmers had been parking trucks full of grain in a parking lot in town.
Cars reached Eston in the late afternoon of Dec. 8 and, with night falling quickly, farmers started to load the cars. Next morning, up and down the line, loading started about 6 a.m. in the dark of a December morning with below-zero temperatures and light snow.
Provincial cabinet ministers Judy Bradley and Berny Wiens arrived about 10 a.m. to congratulate the farmers and to castigate federal transportation policies.
TV cameras from both national networks and reporters from the Producer and area weekly newspapers were on hand long before that.
Rob Lobdell, chair of the group which planned the event, said that farmers saved about $90,000 in elevation charges by shipping their grain in the producer cars.
“But that’s not the issue,” he said.
“The issue is saving our communities.”
By 11 o’clock, most of the cars had been loaded, coffee and doughnuts were almost gone, and the crowd was slipping away.
While the organizers were elated by the success of the day, they knew this was just the first step in trying to save their rail line. That evening, they met representatives from 10 of the 12 rural municipalities through which the line runs.
They wanted to talk about the future and the group’s hopes to convince CN to sell them the line for its salvage value of about $12 million. There were no conclusions reached at the meeting, but the councillors, and a lot of other people, know they will be hearing more from this group in the weeks and months to come.
