(The Toronto Star published the following story by Rob Ferguson on its website on September 23.)
TORONTO — A standoff between independent truckers and CN is over at the railway’s Brampton shipping container depot.
Truckers were refusing to pick up a backlog of containers at the yard because of long wait times, but stopped picketing a week ago as a new system allowing them to make reservations for pickups cut delays to less than an hour.
The dispute, which at one point tied up as much as $300 million worth of goods, had threatened to slow shipments to wholesalers and retailers as they load up on inventory for the busy Christmas season.
“We’re back to work,” Robert Volfson, owner of Carmel Transport International Ltd., said yesterday. “We’re trying to work with CN … it’s working okay for now.”
The backlog of shipping containers ? which come in by ship in Vancouver and Halifax and are transported by rail to Brampton for delivery by truck ? had surpassed 3,000 a couple of weeks ago.
That was triple the depot’s preferred capacity and resulted in wait times of up to five and six hours for truckers who get paid by the load.
The backlog has been cut almost in half to about 1,800, CN spokesperson Mark Hallman said yesterday.
“We’ve made some significant headway. The truckers have come back strongly and we’re getting good turnaround times.”
However, CN is still urging more truckers to arrange pickups outside normal business hours and on weekends ? times that truckers complain are not convenient.
That has forced the truckers’ customers ? from wholesalers to retailers having goods shipped to them from overseas ? to pay extra for deliveries or to arrange to have their shipping docks open at unusual hours, said Volfson.
“We’ll play it by ear.”
CN has also helped alleviate the backlog by arranging to have shipping containers sent to other depots outside Brampton until the numbers are down to the usual level of 1,000, said Volfson.
The backlog, caused in part by the August blackout, meant it took longer for cranes to dig through the piles of containers.
The dispute also hurt exporters, who couldn’t get containers into the Brampton yard for shipment to customers abroad.