Port of Vancouver clears its grain backlog after a three-week rail repair
Twenty-nine vessels were waiting at anchor at the peak. The last of them loads this week.
The lineup of grain vessels that has defined English Bay's horizon since mid-July is dissolving. The port authority confirmed Monday that the last of the twenty-nine ships waiting at the peak of the backlog will load this week, closing out the disruption that began with a washout on the North Shore rail cut.
The three-week repair was, by railway standards, fast. The backlog it created was not small: at anchor rates of roughly $25,000 a day per vessel, the delay bill lands somewhere north of $12 million, most of it ultimately netted out of the prices paid to prairie growers — the invisible export tax that every interruption on this corridor levies a thousand kilometres inland.
The episode has given fresh momentum to the terminal operators' longest-running ask: redundancy on the North Shore cut, where a single track pinched between cliff and tide carries a measurable share of the country's exports. The railway's position is that redundancy exists — via a second crossing and a longer route — which the terminals translate as "via Kamloops."
The bay, for its part, returns to its usual population of bulkers this week. The regulars who walk the seawall and count ships — a larger constituency than either the port or the railway suspects — will notice.
