The primary focus of the grain plan is to set out the volume of grain and grain products that CN plans to move for the year based on what customers (elevators) offer up for movement and to determine if CN has the resources in place to move that volume.

David Przednowek,  assistant vice president of grain for CN says for this year the volumes that they expect to move are up in the air based on what they are hearing from customers, and what you see out in the field given the impact of the dryness and long term drought in Western Canada.

"We're going to be updating those numbers as we file our monthly updates for our grain plan here over the course of the crop year, but in relation to what we have available for capacity, there's plenty of capacity available to move that volume."

He notes in the 2022-23 crop year CN moved over 30 million tonnes of grain and processed grain.

"We moved over 28.1 million tons of grain and processed grain products over the course of the crop year out of western Canada by carload. If you add intermodal shipped directly from Western Canada on top of that, that's another 800,000 tonnes plus. And then, if you include the grain shipped out of eastern Canada, we're well over 30 million tonnes. So one of the highest volumes we've recorded."

Przednowek highlights the fact that last year CN made a lot of fundamental changes to the way it operates this railroad.

"That really translated into strong, consistent grain movement. Over 90 to 100% of the car orders were either supplied in the want week or slightly after the end of the want weeks a very strong consistent grain shipment performance. This is going to be a year where we're going to be refining the plan around the margin. We got a good model here, it's translated into the best velocity. That's the number of miles on average, a car travels in a given day since 2016."

He says that created capacity that allowed them to hit the kind of record individual weeks that they saw with over 800,000 tonnes in one week last year, and achieving a record month in October, 

He mentioned that a challenge remains with grain terminals on the west coast still unable to load grain in the rain.

Glenda-Lee's chatted on Friday with CN's assistant vice president of grain David Przednowek to hear that conversation click on the link below.