Canadian Pacific Railway has never been this busy handling grain.
The rail company says it could set a new crop-year record for grain movement.
“CP is on track at the end of the third quarter of the crop year (April 30) to set a record for movement of Canadian grain for the full crop year,” said company spokesperson Breanne Feigel.
The company won’t release specific tonnage numbers, but Feigel said it has hauled 11 percent more Canadian grain in the first nine months of 2008-09 than during the same period last year.
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April 2009 was the company’s biggest single month in a decade in terms of filling empty orders in the country.
“Certainly grain is our success story for the quarter,” said Feigel.
In the three-month period ending March 31, grain movement provided revenues totalling $286 million, up by 9.8 percent from the same period a year ago.
Grain is the only commodity for which revenues were higher than last year. Coal was down 19 percent, sulphur and fertilizers down 44 percent, forest products down 26 percent, automotives down 29 percent and intermodal down 14 percent.
Grain accounted for about 28 percent of CPR’s total rail revenue of $1.05 billion during the quarter.
Feigel said all players in grain handling and transportation are performing and the results speak for themselves. Train speeds are up, train weights are up and dwell times (trains not moving) are down.
“We have put a lot of focus on performing and moving products more efficiently,” she said.
Feigel added that the downturn in movement of other commodities has freed up equipment and the company is taking advantage of that to move more grain.
As for Canadian National Railway, spokesperson Kelli Svendsen said that since February, car movement for export through West Coast ports has been 33 percent higher than last year.
But she rejected the notion put forward by shippers that additional rail capacity was a big factor in the increased movement.
“It’s been planning and systems that have been improved that have improved the overall flow,” she said.
While all sectors of the system are performing well, she said a new web-based advance car-order system introduced by CN a year ago has been crucial.
CN’s quarterly reports lump grain and fertilizer together, making it impossible to find numbers for grain alone.
In the first three months of 2009, revenue from grain and fertilizer was $357 million, up five percent from last year and tops among all other CN bulk commodities. Total revenue for the quarter was $1.86 billion.
