The St. Lawrence Seaway may be closed for the season, but producer cars loaded with durum will continue moving to Thunder Bay, Ont., this winter, which should help ease the backed-up demand from producer car shippers.
The Canadian Wheat Board is also looking at the feasibility of shipping producer cars directly to Quebec City as part of this year’s winter rail program.
The durum moving to Thunder Bay will go into storage at facilities operated by Mission Terminal and Cargill, then be shipped out when the port opens in the spring.
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“It’s a real life-saver,” said Stacey Wallis, general manager of Great Western Railway, which operates a big producer car program off its line in southwestern Saskatchewan.
The overall pace of grain movement should slow in January and February, she said, freeing up more cars for producers to book and load on their own.
“Now is the time when the CWB can ease some of the stress that producers have been under,” she said.
Demand for producer cars has been high this year due to good supplies of high quality wheat and durum, but cars have been in short supply, especially on lines served by Canadian Pacific Railway, including the GWR short line.
Some farmers have waited weeks or even months for cars, with some loading sites receiving no service at all.
As for the possibility of shipping producer cars directly to export position on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, nothing had been arranged for certain as of the end of December.
“We’re looking at it and certainly we’re going to push the envelope on that,” said Ward Weisensel, the board’s executive vice-president for marketing.
The potential stumbling block is that the winter rail program is based on putting together 50-car trains of cleaned grain at prairie inland terminals, then shipping them in 100-car units to transfer elevators along the St. Lawrence.
The board is studying the logistics and economics of putting together 50-car trains of producer cars and shipping them to the 224,030-tonne capacity Bunge of Canada elevator at Quebec City, the only transfer elevator equipped to clean grain.
“I can’t say it’s going to happen, but we want to make it work where we can,” Weisensel said in an interview shortly before Christmas, adding it will depend on whether something can be negotiated with the railways.
The winter rail program started earlier than usual this year and been cited as one reason for the shortage of producer cars that developed in November.
The board is shipping between 1,000 and 1,200 cars a week directly from the Prairies to Eastern Canada and expects to export more than one million tonnes by the time Thunder Bay opens in the spring.
A significant number of rail cars have also been taken up moving wheat directly to Mexico this winter.
“It’s simply cheaper to move it by rail than by vessels out of the West Coast,” said Weisensel, although he acknowledged that the longer car cycle times in the Mexican program may have cut into car supplies for traditional shipments.
Farmers’ frustration and anger with the lack of producer car movement during the fall culminated in a Dec. 12 meeting in Regina, organized by the Saskatchewan Grain Car Corp., that brought together the CWB, the Canadian Grain Commission and about 35 farmers representing producer car shippers.
While CP wasn’t represented at the meeting, it got most of the attention.
“Not everyone, but a lot of the people there, came to the conclusion that the buck starts and stops with CP,” said James Woodworth of Elrose, Sask., spokesperson for the Prairie Producer Car Shippers Association.
He said farmers on CP lines (or short lines linked to CP) have had problems getting cars, while those on lines served by Canadian National Railway haven’t.
“The responsibility lies somewhere within CP,” Woodworth said.
“Unless they’ve got some smoking gun on why the grain commission or wheat board is at fault, I’m going to leave the blame with them.”
Bernie Churko, president of the grain car corporation, said while it’s “more than coincidental” that things have been much worse on CP than CN lines, pointing fingers won’t solve the problems.
The quality of producer car service is a result of the interaction between the railways, the CWB, the grain commission and farmers.
He said that as the grain handling system has become less regulated, there is no longer a forum for those various players – especially producer car shippers – to plan ahead, discuss problems and devise solutions.
“The farmer puts an order in and then he has no idea what’s happening,” Churko said.
He added there was discussion at the meeting about setting up a structure that would give farmer representatives access to a table where decisions are made on how and where cars get allocated.
