Some attendees at the Fields on Wheels just asked some rather interesting questions of Ray Foot of CP Rail.
Paul Earl wanted to know what CP Rail and other railways could do to increase capacity through the mountains, because that’s often what restricts the amount of grain that gets to Vancouver.
And Bill Cooper and a fellow from a Saskatchewan export organization wanted to know what happens when potash production radically expands and wants to go down the rail lines that farmers rely upon to get their grain to port.
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Foot didn’t have a lot of concrete answers to that, other than more business running down the rails means more incentive for railways to invest more in their lines to increase capacity.
So a sort of “if you can produce and sell it, we can move it” idea.
I must admit the idea of potash production increasing 10-fold and pushing grain off the rails is pretty scary, so let’s hope this industry figures out how to run a whole bunch of extra potash, canola, coal and other commodities down the rail 20 years from now, or we might end up awash in a sea of crops, cut off from the oceans that lead to our buyers.
