As I mentioned in my preamble, we are the leading rail car design, engineering, and manufacturing firm in the world. A lot of the work we do is patented. We have over 250 patents issued to National Steel Car on our rail innovation. We have 50 patents pending at any one time.
We've put an awful lot of thought into this renewal program for the Canadian grain fleet. In this presentation we've shown the tremendous advantage of this new equipment versus the existing equipment.
To go to one of the points you made, how does it unclog the ports? If you envision this equipment as a giant conveyor belt bringing grain to the ports, and you have 200 cars moving through an elevator at any one time and discharging their cargo, each one of those cars is much smaller, has a much smaller capacity, and this all takes time.
This grain all needs to be elevated so it can then be put on a ship to be exported. The amount of time that takes.... You only have a finite amount of time in 24 hours to discharge that grain. If every one of these cars is inefficient and smaller, as we showed in our presentation, the amount of grain that's elevated is much smaller than what could be done with this newer equipment, which has a higher capacity. You're discharging far more grain on a per hour basis and elevating it, which allows you to load ships faster. It gets rid of ship demurrage in the ports and turns ships around more quickly. Speed to market is a tremendous advantage for the grower and for all the members of the supply chain.
The prairie elevators.... It allows the railroads to move much higher tonnage to the ports with each train move, and the result is a lower carbon footprint.
You're moving five existing trains in four trains under this system. So if you can envision five train starts of, say, 200 cars, you're moving those five train starts with four trains with this new equipment. That's where the lower carbon footprint and the higher efficiency come from, and that's where the higher discharge rates at the ports or at the destination occur. That's how it all works.