Bill Woods has sat across the negotiating table from CN Rail innumerable times over the past few years.
And if there’s one thing the secretary of West Central Road and Rail Ltd. said he has learned, it’s to retain a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion when talking business with the railway.
That’s why West Central isn’t yet ready to endorse a proposal that would see prairie farmers join forces with unionized railway workers to lease a network of branch lines from CN.
“Our experience has shown us we must be very careful with any new thing that CN proposes,” Woods said.
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“We have yet to make a decision whether we’ll buy into this.”
Woods thinks the railway may be using this proposal to try to sidetrack the possible imposition of open access by the federal government.
“We’re not against it, we’re just kind of puzzling over it.”
Last month, CN signed a memorandum of understanding with the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees to turn over operations on 1,600 kilometres of prairie branch lines to Prairie Alliance for the Future, a group made up of the union, farmers and community groups.
CN would lease the lines on a long-term basis to the alliance.
The alliance wants to set up a federation of locally controlled non-profit co-operatives to gather, ship and market grain off branch lines that would otherwise be abandoned.
Included in that is a network of nearly 400 kilometres of track running from near Saskatoon to the Alberta border that West Central spent more than two years trying to buy from CN. Those talks broke off in June 2000.
Woods said if the plan was to work as advertised, farmers along the lines would be able to load producer cars wherever they want on the line, which would be an improvement over the current situation.
But he added that West Central is puzzled as to why CN now seems ready to strike a deal, after playing hardball with West Central for more than two years.
In December, West Central officials left a meeting with CN people with a clear understanding that the railway remained diametrically opposed to any proposal to transfer the track to a short-line company.
“Now we’re kicked out of the negotiations and suddenly they’re in a deal with their union,” he said. “What’s different?”
He suspects the railway may see the Alliance proposal as a way to do an end run around open access, and cut the legs off a proposal by short-line operator Omnitrax to run a regional rail network based on open access.
West Central will bide its time and judge the proposal by what comes out of further negotiations between CN and the alliance.
But Woods said that regardless of the outcome, the future of the branch lines in west-central Saskatchewan looks brighter than it has in years.
“Three or four years ago, when we started this, nobody wanted the lines.”
He said even local farmers had been convinced by the railways that short lines were no longer viable.
“Now Omnitrax wants it, the union wants it and we want it. That sounds to me like we’ve made a lot of headway.”
West Central is in the midst of a share offering to raise money to buy or build grain collection and loading facilities along the branch line. The offering closes June 30.
