News you might have missed because of Thanksgiving

I hope all forum members, as well as the staff at TRAINS Magazine who look after the Newswire, are enjoying the US Thanksgiving Day holiday.

CN Rail to invest $10M for monitoring technology as part of safety effort

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/cn-rail-to-invest-10m-for-monitoring-technology-as-part-of-safety-effort-1.1564972#ixzz2lysed5kB

Prairie farm groups want Ottawa to penalize railways for grain shipment backlog

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/prairie-farm-groups-want-ottawa-to-penalize-railways-for-grain-shipment-backlog-1.1564953#ixzz2lyt3O4zn

The farmers obviously want the railroad to carry extra padding just for the fall harvest. If there is a problem, I wonder if it is about crews and units, both CN and CP have cut back so much on staffing that there isn’t much “surge” crews anymore. I did just see a rumor that CP is pulling some 9100 H engines units out of storage from Thunder Bay because of the big harvest.

CP has put a few 9100s into service, but the “H” engined versions, of which there were only 4 in number, were parted out several years ago. In the mean time CP is borrowing locomotives from every US Class I except KCS and BNSF. They are doing this by running a Horsepower-hours deficit.