I'm hesitant to speak for the entire group but I think there is probably some place for a coordinating agency for railcar allocation and for movement.
At Richard's conference earlier this week, Perry Pellerin, who handles logistics for a number of the farmer-owned inland terminals, talked about a situation where there had been four ships at a port owned by a number of inland terminals and some private grain companies, Alliance Grain, that were only partially loaded, having had to move back out to anchor and then move back in because the railways weren't moving all of the cars in a timely manner.
He also talked about dwell times. After the railways finally spot cars, you've got a day to fill them up or you don't get your rail incentive. And then they sit there. In some cases they have sat at grain terminals for 300 hours before moving along to the west coast, and then maybe they don't all get there. Maybe that entire 100-car train doesn't get there. Half of it stops at Edmonton and they tack on something else, and when cars are arriving out of sequence and the grain is arriving out of sequence, it creates many problems and many bottlenecks in the system.
I wish I had solutions but it's a severe lack of coordination. I think that's something we can do without a lot of investment...the coordination of what we've already got in the system for resources, but beyond that, I think that the railways just didn't have enough resources dedicated to grain movement early on in the piece. Certainly they were hit with cold weather and a much larger crop but if you don't have the railcars allocated, if you don't have the locomotives in place, if you don't have the human resources in place, you're behind the eight ball. Why isn't there a system whereby the railways have to indicate how many resources they have committed to grain movement at any given point so that we can judge whether or not they've got adequate resources allocated?
Those are just a few ideas.