CN meeting grain car order demand in western Canada

CN announced yesterday it has met all grain orders in western Canada for the third consecutive week and is now seeking additional export orders from grain companies.

"The decisive action we took in March to deploy more crews and locomotives has led to dramatic improvements in the movement of western Canadian grain," said Doug MacDonald, vice president of bulk at CN, said in a press release.

In addition to meeting all car orders over the past three weeks, the Class I has "spotted more than 5,500 cars every week since early March," he said.

"Sustained sequential improvement across our network in the last two months is enabling us to solicit more orders from grain companies," MacDonald added.

In February, CN averaged 4,129 cars a week. Since then, CN's spotted numbers have increased sequentially to average more than 6,100 cars per week in April, CN officials said.

Weekly demand for the week of April 29 to May 5 is below 5,000 cars and CN is temporarily parking roughly 1,200 hopper cars, they said.

Those cars will be available for any increase in orders moving forward. Removing excess rail-car fleet from the network will improve fluidity for all markets, they added.

As part of CN's CA$3.4 billion capital program in 2018, the railroad is investing in new trade-enabling infrastructure and equipment. In addition to 350 new box cars and 350 new lumber rail cars ordered for this year, CN expects in June to begin taking delivery of the first 60 of 200 new GE locomotives due in service in 2018.