WASHINGTON — Canadian National has defended its request for the Surface Transportation Board to wade into its long-running dispute with Canadian Pacific regarding where the railways interchange in Chicago.
CP last month told federal regulators that CN legally must provide a reasonable location on its own line where it will receive interchange traffic and then provide CP a free route to that point. Clearing, CP argues, does not meet that standard.
“At its core, this matter is simply a business dispute between two carriers, and the Board should decline to become entangled in such disputes,” CP told the board last month.
In a filing last week, CN says that’s a “baffling” position. “Every contested case before the Board involves a private commercial dispute between carriers or between a carrier and its customers,” CN wrote.
“To say that the Board should not decide disputes like this one is to say that the Board should have no role at all,” CN said in its filing.
CN has asked the board to issue a declaratory order that would determine two things: Whether CN has the right to designate Clearing as its point to receive interchange traffic from CP, and whether each railroad should bear its own interchange costs, including fees for the Belt Railway’s switching services.
“For decades, the Belt Railway has operated as a terminal switching carrier that each of its railroad co-owners could use to interchange traffic with each other, with the common understanding that each would bear its own costs for the switching services provided by the Belt,” CN wrote in its filing last week.
CN argues that the board should, “declare that as co-owners of the Belt, CN may lawfully designate Clearing as its interchange point to receive CP traffic, with CP paying its own switching fees, consistent with long-standing industry practice.”
CN also says the board should take into consideration the dramatic decline in blocked crossings in Bartlett since the interchange was moved to Clearing in August 2019.
CP had argued that grade crossing implications should not be considered, and in any event argued that CN had not provided enough data on blocked crossings to prove that the decrease wasn’t due to First Nations’ blockades in Canada or the subsequent decline in rail traffic due to the pandemic.
“The only ‘data’ needed to support this proposition is a calendar,” CN wrote. “CN’s evidence showed that grade crossing blockages dropped precipitously in September 2019, long before the Canadian First Nations protest blocked rail lines in Canada in February 2020 or COVID-19 impacts beginning in March 2020.”
