Despite a weather-delayed harvest, Canadian Pacific (CP) announced that October was its best-ever month for Western Canadian grain movement to Vancouver.
A record 15,865 carloads of grain were moved to West Coast ports in October. The previous record was set in March 2016 with a recorded 15,449 carloads. Total October Western Canadian grain movements were up 3.9 percent over last year, just off the record set in May 2014.
Investments by CP and its supply chain partners on grain country elevator capacity and port capacity has provided greater efficiency, fluidity and velocity for this year’s grain movement.
"I am proud of the CP team and applaud the efforts and early success of our supply chain partners as the crop season begins to accelerate into the colder months," said Keith Creel, CP president and chief operating officer. "We continue to focus on providing best-in-class service to our customers and look forward to moving more Western Canadian grain to market for the benefit of farmers, shippers and the Canadian economy."
"The evidence is clear: CP and its supply chain partners are not only working hard to get this bumper crop to market but succeeding," added Creel. "Together, we are also succeeding in putting old conflicts between railroads and the farmer into the past where they belong."
CP states that, with the winter months and the majority of the 2016/17 crop movement still ahead, finger-pointing and unwarranted criticism of any single component of the complex chain is counter-productive. The company noted that misleading and inaccurate data published by the Ag Transport Coalition continues to promote the notion that an adversarial relationship exists between the railroads and Canada's farm community.
More than three-quarters of CP's Western Canadian grain business uses the Dedicated Train Program (DTP), which allows customers to control their own train assets for a period of 12 months or more. CP pointed out that trying to compare DTP performance to an "order fulfillment" model, as the Ag Transport Coalition does, simply does not work.