While Canadian National Railway has come under constant fire in recent months from grain and other commodity shippers for poor service, its competitor has conspicuously escaped shippers’ wrath.
In fact, ask most shippers about the performance of Canadian Pacific Railway and they’ll say it’s night and day compared with CN.
“Quite frankly I’m pretty impressed with the level of service CP has provided this year,” said Trent Webber, a consultant who deals with transportation issues on behalf of prairie inland terminals.
“They’ve done what the grain industry has asked them to do. It’s very impressive.”
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Mark Hemmes, president of Quorum Corp., the federal grain monitoring agency, said that reflects the feedback he’s been getting from grain shippers this year.
“All of the people we talk to in the industry on a regular basis say CP is meeting or exceeding their performance requirements.”
Senior CPR officials declined to be interviewed for this story.
A company spokesperson said the railway didn’t want to compare itself with its competitor and would rather let its performance speak for itself.
“We’re constantly looking at ways of improving our service to meet our customers’ shipping needs and we feel we have a positive relationship with our customers,” Ed Greenberg said.
One of the most telling statistics to indicate the difference between the two rail companies is car cycle time, or the number of days it takes to move a car from a country elevator to port and back to the country. The number is generally around 18 or 19 days.
So far this year CP’s car cycle is averaging three to five days shorter than CN’s, according to the grain monitor.
Grain shippers point to other performance measures, such as car shortfalls, which refers to situations when a railway fails to deliver an empty car to a country elevator in the week in which it was scheduled.
“CP has not had a lot of shortfalls,” Webber said. “They have kept quite current on their orders. CN hasn’t.”
CP has also shipped more cars in total to export position this crop year, and elevators on CN lines have consistently been more congested due to slower movement.
Industry officials say a number of factors are contributing to the performance gap. Last year CP spent $160 million improving its rail lines in Western Canada and increasing its system capacity by an estimated 12 percent, or about 400 additional freight cars per day.
“Those upgrades have been crucial to the railway’s performance,” Hemmes said. “Fixing up sidings may not be sexy but it makes a railway faster and more efficient.”
Meanwhile, CN has focused much of it corporate attention in recent times on cutting costs.
While that has resulted in spectacular financial results and happy shareholders, disgruntled shippers say it has left the company with insufficient staff and locomotives to meet growing demand.
Industry sources say the two companies also have different approaches to managing grain trains.
CP likes to ship grain in 112-car dedicated grain trains from the Prairies to Vancouver, while CN tends to use grain cars to fill in trains involving other commodities, which can cause delays at switching yards and terminals.
Apart from those infrastructure and operational issues, shippers say there is a noticeable difference in attitude between the two rail companies.
Brian Hayward, chief executive officer of Agricore United, praised CP for its good customer relations.
“They have been much more amenable in working with the industry and talking with people to sort problems through,” he said.
Perry Pellerin of GNP Consulting agreed.
“CP is just a lot easier to deal with,” said Pellerin, who works with a group of inland terminals on transportation issues. “With CP, not everything is the shipper’s fault.”
