Transport Committee on March 24th, 2015

[Jim Vena]

I do not have that number with me. I apologize.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Can you provide that number to the clerk of the committee for the committee's benefit?

[Jim Vena]

Sure.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Okay.

Obviously the concern, as stated in this committee's report, which was tabled not long ago, is that we want to ensure that slower speed is not a replacement for track improvement or track maintenance. I think that was made clear in the committee's expressed will.

The TSB does suggest that track condition or track failure is a likely similarity in all three northern Ontario derailments within the Ruel subdivision. Briefly, what is your response to that?

[Jim Vena]

Listen, we do our own investigation. I think it's preliminary but we do have a number of experts internally on the railroad, and we are more than willing to send things out. The first indication is that we had a rail break. It's more important, though, to look at—

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

In all of them, or are we talking about the March 7 derailment?

[Jim Vena]

The last one was a rail break. They were different, and that's why you have to examine each one of them. You have to step back and not look solely at the cause.

We also look at whether people were doing the right thing and whether the inspections were done properly. We look at all the things that are important to see if we were missing something. That's still ongoing and we await the findings of the TSB final report.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

There were three derailments within 30 days in the same geographic area. The TSB mentions in its interim report that crude oil unit trains may cause different forces on track infrastructure, making potential defects or weaknesses in the track more problematic.

Has CN done any risk assessment of the impact of unit trains of crude oil on track infrastructure?

[Jim Vena]

We have done risk assessments. We have not done a specific risk assessment for a liquid of that volume. We do operate unit trains of ethanol in different parts of our railroad. We do operate trains that are as—

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

But not for petroleum crude oil?

[Jim Vena]

No, and that's something that we are going to look at. We've already looked outside at TTCI, and we'll hire some experts to see if there's something we're missing. We don't think so, but it's not a question of not thinking so; it's a question of opening the book and looking at everything we can do. That's where we are.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

How many inspections of track did CN do in the Ruel subdivision in 2014? How many did you do outside of Ruel, across your network?

[Jim Vena]

Every week, we do a minimum of two, plus we have employees on the trains who tell us what's going on. There are hundreds of thousands of inspections of the railroad and cars, plus automated sensors and ultrasound. I would say that it's in the hundreds of thousands in each area. It truly is. We have a lot of inspections going on using a wide variety of technologies and people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, thank you.

We'll now move to Mr. Komarnicki. You have seven minutes.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you very much for that.

As you mentioned, the public's confidence in safe transportation and rail products is certainly important to employees, communities, and customers. There are many communities you go through. As you said, when you have three accidents in close proximity, both in place and time, you need to ask yourself what is going on, and you definitely need to get to the bottom of that.

A couple of my constituents wrote to me with respect to the derailment. One said that one of her concerns was the length of the trains, and that when she were younger she saw far fewer cars connected together than she sees now. Some are over a mile long. She wondered if there was an issue with the length of the trains themselves, perhaps related to negligence with respect to the repair and infrastructure of the tracks. She may be on to something.

Of course, we read comments like, “the trains are normally too long”, “they go too fast”, and “they're too heavy and it goes too fast”.

I believe you've said you reduced the speed when you're looking to see what the cause may be, so speed obviously is a factor. When you assess the unit trains relating to crude, of course you're talking about a different configuration than you may otherwise have, so that is a difference in factors.

Can you comment on the length of the trains for my constituent who says that trains seem to be longer, that they seem to be going faster, that they're more frequent, and of course that the loads are heavy? What do you say to all that?

[Jim Vena]

We haven't changed the speed that we operate at as a maximum speed. We operate our freight trains at a maximum speed of 60 miles an hour, as long as the configuration of the track is such that it can handle it. We have never changed that. It's limited by curvature, the type of track, the area, visibility. We take in a lot of factors when we look at it, so there's no change there.

The trains we've been operating are the normal crude trains, the 100 cars. If it's a unit train, it's somewhere in the 90 to 100 range. We operate trains that are 150 cars. We run grain trains to the west coast from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba that are about 150 to 175 cars. The technology has changed. The airbrake system has changed. When I was hired on the railroad, if you tried to handle a train over 100 cars with the airbrake system that was in place there, you just would not be able to release the brakes, you would not be able to handle it that way. It wasn't the issue.

We also have DP locomotives that we can put on the train in two or three locations, front and back, operated by one person in the front. The technology has come to the point that we operate our intermodal trains most days at 8,000 to 10,000 feet—I apologize, we're still using miles and feet. But we operate them every day at that length. We run coal trains going to Prince Rupert as big as 220 cars. It's a safe way to do it. We've been doing it for a number of years. They're heavy cars, but that's what the infrastructure is built for. It makes us efficient.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I understand in western Canada, one of the reasons for not hauling the volume of grain that could be hauled normally was because of the cold weather and the reduction in the length of trains.

[Jim Vena]

That's correct. That's what we had last winter. I'm glad you asked me about grain; it's nice to report. I looked at it this morning. The fact is, our outstanding orders are less than 2,000 cars of grain, on the books that we have today. The weekly amount that we moved last week was 4,861 cars. It is less than a half a week of backlog.

There is no area that has a backlog of grain going to the U.S. The small producers, people going to the west coast, we are not picking.... The total orders outstanding are around 2,000—it's actually less than 2,000, but let me just say 2,000—and we're handling close to 5,000 a week. We want to bump it up because the orders went up this week. We're going to do over 5,000 cars. It's all about business and money—

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

It's a good plug for what you're doing in western Canada for sure.

When you have these accidents occurring in close proximity, in such a short space of time, you have to say it must be something to do with the infrastructure. You need to test the tracks more. Maybe it's the technology you're using. I know when the first accident occurred, I think you received an order to look at what the cause may have been and take some measures as a result of that. When we talked about Gogama and the first accident, what did you do differently after you investigated the first accident that may have been a positive, proactive step that you engaged in that regard?

[Jim Vena]

I think it's a great question, sir.

The first accident happened. The trend line, if you look on the slide with NOD, did not give us any outlier that we had an issue in infrastructure, and we'll see what we find out at the end. The normal reaction is to find out. We send in our own experts to find out exactly what happened. If we need to slow down a piece of track because we don't understand it, we look at the type of rail, we look at who manufactured the rail. Do we have other issues? If it was a railcar, we look at who loaded it, how it was loaded, and we do a lot of homework. These happened so quickly to us that we didn't get a clear answer on the first derailment, but after the third derailment there was no question that we had to react even without knowing the cause. That's why we slowed the speed down, did even more inspections than we had before. We wanted to make sure we understood it. That's what we've done.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Did you take any physical maintenance and repair actions anywhere along those lines?

[Jim Vena]

We did. We lowered our standards. We think that on the first accident we had a joint failure at a place where the signal system works. We did drop the standard and made sure that we're going out there way ahead of it to clean that up even faster than we normally would.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

You said you take some time to step back and say, “We don't understand why this is happening.”

Sometimes having a third party look at it objectively, which is totally unrelated to your operation, is a second set of eyes. You mentioned something about that. Can you maybe amplify that and say what you've done in that regard?

[Jim Vena]

I think the TSB is great. They showed up on site. They came out there to take a look at it and they're more than willing to always tell us, “Listen, we see something here that you should take a look at.” I think they are a nice, clear conscience to look at it. They're professional. They know what they're doing.

Transport Canada shows up and looks at it to see if there's anything and they give us feedback. If we don't understand something, we're willing to hire anybody, whether it's the transportation centre in Pueblo, Colorado, which every railroad in North America works with; scientists who look at the infrastructure and at what we can do on the railcars; or we do it ourselves, by going to universities that we partner with. It's very important that we get to the bottom of it.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I have a short quick question. Your emergency response plan, as planned compared with how it was effectively carried out, how did it work?