Yes, sir, if may, I have a couple of comments.
I'll step back to the comments about the history of CP. Unfortunately, I've only been at CP for about 13 or 14 months, so I can't speak to the history, but I can speak to the mandate. That's exactly what our mandate is, what my mandate is, and what the new management team's mandate is: to improve those service levels so that our customers don't continue to experience shortages and poor service. That's exactly what we're focused on doing, and I would suggest that we've had quite a bit of success over the past 13 months in doing that.
Turning to your point about reducing locomotives and cars, you've caught the essence of part of that. For cars that were reduced, the preponderance of those cars were beyond their service life. They have a certain amount of years, according to regulations, that they can stay in service, so they were retired. They were turned back to the people we leased them from. They were scrapped.
On locomotives, we have locomotives stored today. To suggest adding locomotives or adding cars, that I would do that, the answer would be no, because you need three things to run trains. You need cars, you need locomotives, and you need crews. To Claude's point, if we go to the timeline, we understand something as simple as how long it takes to hire employees, how long it takes to hire a conductor, and how long it takes to train a conductor to become a locomotive engineer so they can move those additional trains, if we had the locomotives and cars to do it. There's at least a six-month lead time to go out to the market to identify a need for conductors and to hire someone to test them, to train them, and to qualify them.
You can't respond and turn on a dime when you're told in November that you have an 80 million tonne crop to move. It's just simply impossible. As much as I'd like to do it, and economically and financially it's to our betterment to do it, it's just impossible to do it. That's the challenge we face.