British Columbia Wildfires Impacting Canadian Exports and Imports

Hundreds of rail cars have been halted by wildfires that damaged tracks in western Canada during the region’s severe heat wave, creating a bottleneck of exports and delaying imports.

A fire that burned down a village in British Columbia last week damaged two nearby tracks operated by Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. and Canadian National Railway Co., the two companies that account for the bulk of train transportation to the country’s biggest port in Vancouver. Grains, lumber, containers and other goods move along these lines...

The long disruption means “we’re talking thousands of containers stuck in transit. If you drive by CN yard, it is a ghost town and it’s just plugged with containers,” said Tom Johnson, spokesperson for Port Transport Association, a group of about 35 trucking companies that handle containers coming to Vancouver by rail and sea.

“What a lot of carriers have done is they have stopped their intermodal unit in Calgary, and then they are trucking from Calgary to Vancouver,” Johnson said. “People don’t realize the impact, and you’re going to see the impact in the stores if these trains don’t start moving in Vancouver.”...

This is from the 6 July 2021 edition of gCaptain.