CN Rail seeing good grain movement following record week and weather disaster

With the winter approaching rapidly CN Rail is looking at a lot of movement coming as winter approaches the prairies.

With plenty of grain left in prairie bins following the harvest, CN Rail will be moving quite a bit of that to buyers over the coming months.

Assistant Vice President of Grain at CN Rail David Przednoweck says that they've been seeing a lot of movement over the previous two weeks.

"Things have been running hard here, especially over the past couple of weeks. If we go back to grain shipment week 10, which is the week of October six, CN set an all-time Canadian record for the most grain and processed grain product shipped in a single week ever. We hit almost 838,000 metric tons. The previous record was around 810,000 metric tons, set a number of years ago. Everything clicked, that week had really good terminal performance, all that good stuff, and it was all of the components of the end-to-end supply chain clicking at the same time, which is what you need to hit a number like that."

Unfortunately, their record week was then followed up by one marred by disaster on the western coast.

"Now going into grain shipment week 11, that was the week of October 13th. You'll remember from the news reports last weekend that a really wicked atmospheric river event nailed southern British Columbia. This was like a one-in-100-year type rainfall event, if not more severe. Unfortunately, there was also some loss of life in southern British Columbia as a result of the atmospheric river event."