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

Oct 25, 2024

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."

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Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.