CALGARY — Canadian Pacific Railway is helping put the grit back in New York — one year later.
That’s grit as in the abrasive used in sandblasting bridges and ships in preparation for repainting.
When the events of Sept. 11 shut down sandblasting operations on New York’s George Washington Bridge, BEI Pecal’s grit suddenly wasn’t need but the company had already shipped a lot of the product by Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).
That’s when the Connetix experts at CPR came to the rescue. Connetix is a network of logistics and commercial product-handling experts and 23 transload facilities across Canada and the United States. These CPR employees found a way to store tons of the grit several months at the Oak Island transload facility in Newark, N.J., for BEI Pecal until its distributor, Techni-Quip, could find other buyers. Once sandblasting operations started back up, Connetix helped BEI Pecal resume shipping grit in July.
Oak Island’s location about 20 miles from the George Washington Bridge is why BEI Pecal chose to ship grit in the first place by rail with CPR. The grit is transloaded at Oak Island into trucks, and the trucks deliver the product the rest of the way to the sandblasting contractor’s storage silos, which aren’t on a rail line.
“Moving 100 tons at a time by rail, you’re getting it down close to the source far less expensively than moving it all the way by truck,” said Don McMillan, BEI Pecal’s manager of logistics and purchasing.
Shipping by rail costs BEI Pecal less than half what it would cost to ship that much grit by truck all the way from its plant in Waterdown, Ont., which is 40 miles west of Toronto.
“Connetix made it economically possible for us to compete in the New York markets. That’s really the key,” Don said.
He credits Steve Grant, CPR’s Connetix operations manager in Mississauga, Ont., and Frank George in Minneapolis, a Connetix marketing manager, for making it all work.
“They put us together with the transload company; they married us to them. That was No. 1. They worked with us in terms of timing,” Don said.
A number of improvements have been made in the last year at Oak Island. Bulkmatic Transport Co., the facility operator, has added different types of dust collection systems and a new conveyor for transloading the grit. CPR is paving more of the terminal and adding a third track. The facility, which is overseen by on-site terminal manager Greg O’Byrn, has 60 car spots for handling both dry bulk and liquid bulk and three transfer holding tracks for storing railcars.
Connetix managers work to ensure the shipper receives the proper car type and that there is a quick asset turnaround, said Kathy Davies in Mississauga, who handles the BEI account. The offloading of the grit needs to coincide with the arrival of pneumatic tractor-trailers that take the product to the bridge contractor.
When there was a problem with a certain type of covered hopper that had gates too low to the ground, Connetix found a solution.
“We worked with car management to get appropriate cars, so they didn’t have to maneuver and reposition the cars so much” to get the product out, Kathy said.
A year ago, workers at Oak Island were transloading BEI Pecal’s grit when their gaze was diverted to the Manhattan skyline on the morning of Sept. 11. It had been only a week since Bulkmatic Transport had taken over as the facility operator.
“We watched both towers fall that morning. One of my trainers said this is going to change everything,” recalled Doug Bell, Bulkmatic’s vice president of Eastern operations.
He was right.
But like New Yorkers, Connetix and its partners pulled together to help the shipper.
Just call it True Grit.
CPR’s 14,000-mile network serves the principal centers of Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, and the US Northeast and Midwest regions. CPR’s track feeds directly into the Chicago hub from the East and West coasts. Alliances with other carriers extend CPR’s market reach into the major business centers of Mexico. For more information, visit CPR’s website at www.cpr.ca.