BNC Rail Scandal/This Is What It Was All About: China !

[Securious]

[size=200]CN Rail growing leaps and bounds[/size]



[a backdoor secret deal at odds against Canadian "Security"  Interests] ..me S



February 12, 2012

Christine HINZMANN

Citizen staff

chinzmann@pgcitizen.ca





Becoming a transportation hub has been a Prince George ambition for years.



CN Rail's intermodal facility along First Avenue is a big indicator the goal is being met.



"Prince George is very gifted, by accident or design, it's a hub city," said Tim McEwan, former CEO of Initiatives Prince George. "The railroads intersect here, the highways intersect here, and the airport has Canada's third longest commercial runway. The boundary road connector is going in and that will be substantially complete in June and that opens up 3,000 acres of light industrial land. The table's set for growth and P.G. is well positioned as a multi-modal hub moving forward."



CN reached an agreement with China's CNBM Forest Products Trading Ltd. to use the company's new lumber transload facility in Vancouver and started the operation of its lumber container export facility at its Thornton Yard in Surrey in November.



Currently It's eight acres in size, capacity is about 10,000 containers per year, with room to grow up to 20 acres.



The Prince George distribution centre has an 84,000-square-foot warehouse and 10 acres of outside storage. An adjacent intermodal rail yard features two, 2,400-foot pad tracks, trucking and truck-pick-up capabilities and an automated gate system.



At a cost of $20 million, the facilities were completed in 2007, just two weeks before the first ship was to arrive at the new Fairview container ship terminal in Prince Rupert, 720 kilometres west of Prince George.



In November 2007, the inland container port opened in Prince George coincident with the Port of Prince Rupert. And the CN terminal in Prince George was ready when the Chinese dimension lumber market took hold, and it came on ferociously around April to July 2010.



By April 2010 around 30 containers a week were coming through the facility. Dimension lumber exports and some pulp started coming through in July of 2010, and the trajectory of business shot up from there to about 400 to 450 containers a week last summer and about 700 to 800 now.



HOW IS GROWTH BEING MANAGED?



Questions arise over how such an expansion has affected the railroad - how has the number of employees and variety of duties changed? How is Prince George benefitting exactly? How CN does address rail improvements, maintenance, new sidings, low rail heads and other issues of safety?



These questions will be addressed at a later date since representatives at CN Rail were not available to speak to The Citizen by press time.



However it's known that when there were 30 containers a week, about five to 10 employees were working full time. Then the count went up to 25 last spring and 32 in August, 57 by fall and now CN Rail employs around 80 at the inland port.



The role of an economic development authority like Initiatives Prince George and government is to be facilitative -- to help set the stage for the private sector to succeed and ensure that there's the capacity to get goods and services to market. So Initiative Prince George is paying close attention.



"We've gone from having a fledgling intermodal facility to a true small inland port," said McEwan. "When I went to inland port conferences, like the one in Chicago last June, Prince George was recognized as a key node on CN's system."



In terms of improvements to the facility, CN has erected new sidings and improvements along the corridor to accommodate the increased traffic. In regards to Prince George procurement, it's important to get the Pine Pass fixed, including addressing the low rail overheads and smoothing out hair pin turns.



"It's not a stretch to think that agricultural products can be moved from the Peace area through the Prince George intermodal and even from Vanderhoof," said McEwan.



It's an important market signal in its own right to have this kind of facility up and running, said McEwan.



"When businesses and people in the private sector see the sheer volume of containers at First Avenue, that gets the creative juices flowing and people start to think about what products they can export," McEwan said. "What we've got here because it's the shortest supply chain route -- literally ocean to rail route -- between China and the U.S. heartland markets."



BUSINESSES ONBOARD



That's what happened when COSCO got wind of the opportunities.



China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), which owns 500 modern merchant ships, has been a big part of that process.



COSCO ranks first in the international bulk shipping sector and is listed as one of the top 10 container liner operators in the world. It is now the world's second-largest shipping enterprise.



The partnership between CN Rail and COSCO is very valuable, said David Bedwell, executive vice president of COSCO.



"For us as an ocean carrier we've been able to capitalize on an opportunity to partner with CN to promote Canadian exports from northern British Columbia via the Prince Rupert gateway to Asia Pacific destinations," he said.



Their containers move from China to Canada and the U.S. and back through circuitous routes - for example, a container shipment starting at Shanghai goes through the Prince Rupert Port and, via CN Rail, through Prince George and on into North America, going to a destination like Toronto, Montreal, Chicago or Memphis.



Once the container is emptied by a big box store, it's returned to an ocean carrier at an inland point in either the U.S. or eastern Canada. The container is then, in many cases, used for a railroad domestic purpose.



The railroad will use the empty container and put into it railroad-specific and domestic cargo and then move that cargo from an inland point in North America to a Western Canadian point.



Once that domestic cargo is emptied, it's positioned to Prince George.



"Then the northern B.C. exporters in your region are being very nice and working out deals with us to load those containers full of B.C. forest products and we ship them to final destination, China," said Bedwell. "So there's a big, big circle and that's what we do every single day."



According to Bedwell the future is bright for the CN Rail inland container port.



"As long as China continues to buy Canadian forest products, specifically lumber and pulp, Prince George has a very promising future," said Bedwell. "We, both COSCO and CN, are trying to develop it further now that the capacity has increased -- we want to go bigger and better," said Bedwell. "We really rely on these big box stores to buy more cargo from Asia, bring it in containers, so that we have those empty containers to give back to the Canadian exporters. Instead of moving empty containers onto ships, Prince George is a nice place to stop, drop them off, pick up some cargo then take them off to China and everybody's happy."



THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT



Prince George needs to continue to stretch and think about the things we can export to China and to the vast markets of the Asian Pacific, McEwan said.



"Beef, tree fruit and seafood is something we can move out of the airport and so too, there may be other agricultural products," said McEwan. "We've got this huge land base with a lot of opportunity to supply this insatiable market - it's just staggering what the opportunity is. We have a toehold with dimension lumber and pulp and in behind that coal and also there's a fair bit of aluminum in Kitimat that's being shipped. They need everything and we've got it all."



CN's Intermodal is an important and potentially transformative development that's really taken hold in the last 18 months.



As Prince Rupert grows, so will Prince George -- as the next node of the multi-nodal corridor. Typically in order to have a big enough catchment area to aggregate enough export volume it's about 600 to 800 kilometres from node to node.



"Prince George is ideally positioned," said McEwan. "We're 800 kilometres from Prince Rupert and about the same from Edmonton so it's the perfect place to aggregate the product moving forward."







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A huge transportation grid is in development including ,trucking, rail and flights..also pipelines!!! There is a technological parallel, the Energy Super Grid. I will track down a diagram/graphic Illustration later for you all. All about China..hence the secrecy.

[Securious]

yep