The company that operates the port of Churchill and its rail line wants the federal government and Canadian National Railway to stop scrapping aluminum hopper cars.
Omnitrax wants to know if the lightweight cars, which were originally built for service to Churchill, could still move grain and other commodities to and from the northern Manitoba port.
“We have indicated our interest in the cars to the minister of transport and Transport Canada officials,” said Mike Ogborn, managing director of Omnitrax Canada, which owns Hudson Bay Railway.
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He said the company wants an independent third party to evaluate the cars’ condition and their suitability for service on the line from The Pas to Churchill.
“I would say we believe there are certainly better uses for those cars than to scrap them,” he said.
Under an operating agreement signed between Ottawa and CN last summer, the 1,902 aluminum cars in the fleet are to be taken out of service and disposed of by 2012. Since Aug. 1, 2007, about 450 cars have been sold for scrap.
Only a handful are being used, with most parked at various locations across Western Canada awaiting a trip to the scrap yard.
The government and CN say the cars are no longer suitable for service and are unsafe to operate.
However, a Transport Canada report from 2002 said 90 percent of the 2,192 aluminum hoppers in service at that time were in good condition and could be expected to have a useful life until at least 2016.
The lightweight aluminum cars were built specifically to traverse the difficult terrain across the shifting northern Manitoba permafrost.
Bill Drew, executive director of the Churchill Gateway Development Corp., said the cars could be ideal for the northern port.
“We would certainly like to make use of however many we could get our hands on,” he said, adding they would be suitable not just for grain, but also for other products like wood pellets and fertilizer.
“It would be a shame to see them all destroyed without taking another look at them,” he said. “If they truly have to be scrapped, then there’s no harm letting us look at them.”
