NASHVILLE — Canadian National expects to have its severed British Columbia main line back in service by the weekend, which will help ease a logjam of traffic bound to and from Vancouver, Canada’s busiest port.
Heavy rains lashed southern British Columbia last month, causing landslides, flooding, and major washouts in the directional running zone where CN and Canadian Pacific share track.
“Over the past couple weeks we’ve experienced some significant rains in southern B.C. Remember this is an area that during the summer experienced a large amount of forest fires. So the mountainside is very fragile,” Chief Operating Officer Rob Reilly told an investor conference on Wednesday morning. “Over the past couple of weeks we’ve experienced over 50 mainline outages between Kamloops and Vancouver, and as I speak here today we’re down to one significant outage between Kamloops and Boston Bar that the team is out there working 24 by 7 to get back into service. Probably by this weekend we’ll have service completely restored in to Vancouver.”
CN and CP will then begin to clear the backlogs of grain and international intermodal traffic that have built up over the past few weeks. “The recovery will spill well beyond December and go into January 2022 and even February 2022,” Chief Financial Officer Ghislain Houle says.
CN and CP trains are currently using CP’s line in and out of Vancouver, which severely restricts capacity on the busiest freight corridor in Canada. More than 73 miles of containers have built up at Vancouver’s on-dock terminals, according to the latest data from Port Vancouver.
CN has been able to divert some intermodal and grain traffic to the Port of Prince Rupert. CN’s main line to Rupert was not affected by the storms. “It’s one of the advantages of our network,” Reilly says.
The CN executives spoke with analyst Justin Long at the Stephens Annual Investment Conference.
