The railways are doing a wonderful job of moving grain. Just ask them.
Grain movement is better than last year’s debacle, so anyone who complains about service doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Yet somehow the weekly performance statistics from the Ag Transport Coalition paint a different picture.
For the first time, there is timely information detailing railway performance. Led by Pulse Canada and supported by the federal government’s Growing Forward 2 program, reports are non-judgmental. They simply lay out the statistics and leave the interpretation to others.
Read Also
Farmer ownership cannot be seen as a guarantee for success
It’s a powerful movement when people band together to form co-ops and credit unions, but member ownership is no guarantee of success.
Other agricultural organizations help fund the initiative.
As executive director of the Inland Terminal Association, I’ve had a front row seat as the reporting process has evolved. I’m certainly not a logistics expert, so I’ll leave detailed analysis to those more qualified, but many of the numbers speak for themselves.
Total unfilled shipper demand was more than 19,000 cars as of Week 26, the mid-point in the shipping season, which is about 10 percent of total demand. Shippers continue to expect the railways to provide 10,816 of these cars, excluding orders associated with rejected cars, denied orders and railway cancellations.
Canadian National Railway spotted 3,302 hopper cars in the country in Week 26 and Canadian Pacific Railway spotted 3,020 cars. Most of them had been ordered for previous weeks.
Total movement is certainly one measurement of railway performance, but it’s more important to know how well the railways are meeting shipper demand. Based on that metric, the railways continue to create a bottleneck in meeting sales commitments.
Farmer deliveries to prairie grain terminals continue through all kinds of weather, through road ban season and through spring seeding. Country terminals find a way to have enough grain to fill the cars that are delivered.
Some analysts point to west coast port capacity as a potential bottleneck, but the railways have never been able to swamp the terminals in Vancouver and Prince Rupert. Major investments are being made in Vancouver terminal capacity.
The reports include a breakdown by corridor. Shippers who are moving product to the United States or Mexico or to Vancouver for trans-loading are much less likely to receive their car allocation than if they are shipping bulk to Vancouver or Thunder Bay.
Bulk shippers who load unit trains in multi-car blocks are generally expected to load cars within 24 hours of them being dropped off. However, unit trains are waiting an average of 40 hours this year on CN lines to be picked up after loading and 60 hours on CP lines. Only 29 percent were picked up within 24 hours.
A mountain of data is compiled to build each week’s report, and adjustments continue in how the information is presented. The program is managed by QGI Consulting.
There should be more statistics to reflect country terminal loading performance, and it would also be useful to have statistics on producer car movement. All the anecdotal evidence suggests producer car service has been horrendous.
Further report refinements are likely, but for the first time, timely railway performance data is available for all to see at www.agtransportcoaltion.com.
Measurement and transparency are vital for making system improvements, which means coalition re-ports are a potential game changer.
