Doug MacDonald, CN’s vice president of bulk products, told attendees of the Midwest Association of Rail Shippers’ summer meeting in Lake Geneva Tuesday to expect a change of direction.
“I think we’re going to introduce a brand new operating plan this fall because we’ve gotten away from some of our roots, I’ll be very candid about that,” MacDonald said in response to a question on operating ratios and scheduled railroading. “We are not the scheduled railway we used to be and a lot of that is because of the infrastructure issues we have.”
He referred to the traffic boost shippers gave CN starting in 2015, which led to record volume increases, but also service failures in 2017. This year, CN railroaders report train back-ups on the U.S. side of the border for lack of crews to run trains to their destinations.
CN is hiring crews throughout its network, and MacDonald says the railroad has hired 1,000 new people in Wisconsin and Minnesota alone. Despite that hiring pace, MacDonald says about 30 percent of new hires leave training in the first year — meaning that the railroad expects to continue hiring. This is in addition to tens of millions of dollars in new double-track and longer sidings the railroad is investing throughout its network.
“If you can’t run at the speed you need to, to provide the service you need to on your main line you’re going to have a harder time meeting your customer requirements to service them,” he says. “So we will come out with a new operating plan that will address a lot of that and get us back to doing what we say we’ll do. And that’s really all we want.”
MacDonald let out a few details about the plan, including that CN will begin tracking carloads from origin to destination. It’s something already done in MacDonald’s bulk products division. He says the railroad will also revamp its customer service organization with a focus on the supply chain for shippers. He says he expects it will improve customer service overall.
