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CN Rail Apologizes Again for Grain Backlog

Company is spending $250M to improve the rail corridor

Railroad tracks

CN Rail is again apologizing to farmers in the Peace Region, Alberta, Canada, for not getting grain to market this winter says a report from EverythingGP.com.

Executive Vice President Sean Finn says the company has not cleared the backlog in this area yet but is working on it.

"We've increased capacity to make sure we that get to it, so we've done three very concrete things," he says. "We've hired almost 1,000 new employees, we'll have hired 1,000 by the end of June of this year, we're almost at 600 already. We have gone out and leased locomotives. We ordered 200 new locomotives. We won't have them for six months to a year, so we've leased temporary locomotives and finally, we're going to invest capital in the Edmonton to Winnipeg corridor."

Finn says the company is spending $250 million to improve that rail corridor. He says CN believes it is better to upgrade existing lines than to re-open ones that have been closed for a long time.

Finn also thinks they will be able to move grain more quickly because the weather is warmer.

"So, we fully expect to catch up and we're going to see a large movement of grain in the coming weeks," he says. "Normally in the winter period, when it's really cold, we'd spot 4,000 grain cars a week. Now, in the last four or five weeks, we've spotted over 5,500 cars a week, so it just shows you we're catching up and we're going to get to those elevators that haven't had that service for a little while to make sure we get that grain moving."

Finn says CN believes the new Transportation Modernization Act should be passed as quickly as possible. He says there are provisions to make CN more accountable as a company and what he terms "more robust" information sharing between the company, grain handlers, and producer groups with Transport Canada included in the bill.

Read the full article here.

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