Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for coming out here this morning.
I'm going to ask some very pointed questions purely to wrap my brain around why it took so long. The reason I'm going to ask them this way is that there were railroad tracks behind my house and my parents' house, and I lived there from—boy, did I just age myself—1980. I think the railway ran for about 15 years.
In the very early 1980s, at two o'clock in the morning, a train derailed behind my house. There was a hundred years' flood and storm, one of the wildest storms you ever saw. Anhydrous ammonia tankers flipped over on their sides right in our backyard. I will say that the first responders were there fast, super-duper fast. We had a lot of people running around in our backyard to stop the leaks and so on and so forth.
Because I lived with the train tracks for so long, I know that there are always maintenance vehicles. They're pickup trucks that drive down the road, get to a cross-section, put the rails down and drive.
I realize this is a question for CN, so I appreciate the fact that you could defer to them, but could you explain to me why they couldn't get a maintenance truck from a road either from the front of the train on the tracks or from the back of the train on the tracks to the train to cut the tree off?