I don’t think most people have a tangible idea regarding how our consumption is driving transportation demands. When we add the amount of tar sands oil that is being planned for, even if we have pipelines, the northern CN route may become one of the busiest rail routes in the world. With a substantial amount of tar sands oil and other crude products heading for the Pacific Rim, rail tanker traffic might look like this: As an abstract, each one of these tanker trains is a mile long and would be traveling at about 30 miles per hour, so if one combined all of the daily trains together, one might want to imagine a 70 mile stretch of train making its way every day through these remote wilderness areas. And remember, for every oil tanker car that arrives at port, an empty one must be returned. So that’s now a 140 mile stretch of tanker train – everyday. So imagine this single 140 mile tanker train traveling at 30 miles per hour – it would take over four hours for such a train to pass by. This becomes a significant intrusion into remote ecosystems. Some people might ask, “How bad could that be?” The answer might lie within the volume of “total” cargo inbound and outbound. We would be adding this oil traffic to coal, grain and other resources plus a great deal of in-bound freight that continues to grow in volume – because we want more “stuff” from China. No matter how you look at it, the future of Canada’s rail corridors will become like freeways at rush hour – the difference being, few people will see the daily havoc that it will play on these remote environments and ecosystems.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 16:51:21 +0000
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