Pretty interest stuff if you are interested in railroading behind the locomotives (economic railfan) as I am. The 48 page report goes into considerable detail on the projections for this year’s grain crops and how those will be transported, primarily to the West coast for export.
I am not an expert on Canada grain, but found this an interesting read until work started piling up. Will review later.
One thing I found interesting. CN has about 13,000 covered hoppers available and indicated they plan on moving 7800 cars/week during non winter months and 6250 during winter.
Seems to me that is very high utilization…turning a car every 2 weeks including spotting, loading, transporting to tranloading terminal, unloading, returning for assignment.
Is that reasonable? Any other “Canada grain” issues to discuss?
That is high utilization - and easily attainable IF REPEAT IF - Terminal Operations have no hitches in the giddyup. Load a unit train in 24 hours at Origin, unload the same train in 24 hours at the ports. Minimal line of road delays on both the loaded and empty trips.
What is the likelyhood of everything going right all the time?
If you take the average weekly grain tonnage shipped in Oct/Nov 2022-23 in figure 17 (~710,000 metric tonnes) and divide it by the 2022-23 average payload per rail car in figure 16 (~95 metric tonnes), you get 7,473 cars per week. That’s close to the 7,800 cars CN is forecasting for 2023-24. Looking at figure 17, the weekly tonnage shipped stats have been trending consistently upward since 2007-08, with single year decreases (like 2021-22) due to droughts and resulting smaller grain harvests.
And if some of the naysayers here would have read the document all the way thru, they would have seen that CN is well aware of all of the logistical issues outside of their control that can screw things up
