(The Associated Press circulated the following story by Dave Kolpack on January 10.)
FARGO, N.D. — The president of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe railroad says the late delivery of railroad cars to North Dakota is not a crisis but says the company will make changes to improve service.
The railroad plans to add 6,000 grain cars over the next four years and will hire an ombudsman in North Dakota to handle complaints from shippers, BNSF president Matt Rose said Friday.
“I see our rail system running very well,” Rose told a group of grain shippers and state officials Friday. “People ask me if I understand the lateness, and the answer is yes. But this state, quite frankly, is just about reflective of the overall network.”
Rose told the group that he feels like he’s “constantly being demonized in this state” despite making “humongous investments” in improvements specifically for North Dakota.
“The complaints we get out of the state are at a much higher level than what we hear out of other states,” Rose said after the meeting. “We feel like we’re a very important partner of our customers and producers, and sometimes that doesn’t always come through.”
Grain shippers are upset by late railroad car deliveries, forcing elevator managers to pile crops on the ground and preventing millions of dollars worth of grain from moving to market. Pete Peterson, who manages elevators in Petersburg and Dahlen, said some of his BNSF shipments are up to two months late, as opposed to a two-week backlog with his Canadian Pacific deliveries.
“This didn’t make me very optimistic,” Peterson said after the meeting. “I appreciate the gentlemen coming out here to meet with us … but the railroad is going to determine who lives and who dies by their type of system that they want to put in place.
“Burlington Northern is going to be awfully rough on rural America,” he said.
Rose said the situation has improved since late November, when demand hit its peak. In the last week of December, the railroad hauled 40 percent more cars out of North Dakota than it did a year ago, he said. Service is up 11 percent from last year over the past four months, Rose said.
This also is an unusual shipping year because of a banner harvest, Rose said. “It is the proverbial saying, we don’t want to build a church for Easter Sunday,” he said.
Rose said the additional cars will increase capacity, but said they will not solve the problem of a large harvest.
He said the state of Washington has its own railcars to handle large apple crops, and the Canadian government owns about 80 percent of the grain cars in that country.
The ombudsman will help coordinate deliveries, Rose said. That representative should improve service, Peterson said.
“Canadian Pacific has two of them in the state and they are a good liaison,” he said. “Whether they (BNSF) give (the ombudsman) the power they say they are going to is another thing.”
The railroad also has agreed to roll back a $100-per-car rate increase on cars that were supposed to be delivered by Dec. 16, but were not. “We’re trying to put an olive branch out there,” said Rose, who told the group he would not discuss shipping rates.
Grain dealers and public officials also believe that BNSF provides better service with its large shuttle loaders than it does with hopper cars to smaller elevators. A small number of elevators are capable of loading shuttle cars, while the smaller elevators typically load either 26- or 52-car trains.
BNSF has 26,000 railcars in its fleet, of which 8,000 are shuttle cars, said Steve Bobb, railroad vice president.
“If you’re a shuttle loader in our network, you would understand also that we weren’t able to sell enough shuttles,” Rose said. “We’re not satisfying the shuttle demand, either.”
Steve Strege, spokesman for the North Dakota Grain Dealers Association, said afterward that he hopes the meeting will lead to progress in the ongoing shipping dispute.
“I think that Mr. Rose got more of a sense of the frustration out there,” Strege said.