Canadian Pacific Kansas City’s (CPKC) tri-national network is paying off for communities fortunate enough to be within spur distance. Spanning Canada coast-to-coast and striking deep into Mexico makes the carrier an obvious choice for agribusinesses looking to link growers to consumers without the delays of interline handoffs.
Rising 150 feet into the big sky around the small town of Coaldale on CPKC’s Taber Subdivision (east of Lethbridge and southeast of Calgary) in the agricultural belt of southern Alberta is a massive erector set of steel cubes that by the end of this growing season will be able to rack up to 56,000 pallet loads of frozen french fries. A pallet can be loaded to or retrieved from anywhere in the robotic version of a Rubic’s Cube in less than six minutes. Trucks are similarly loaded and unloaded automatically.
NewCold, the Netherlands company building the facility, says CPKC’s geographical reach was decisive in its US$161 million investment. “CPKC’s single-carrier service was a key factor in our decision to invest in Coaldale,” said NewCold communications manager Molly Rupp May 2.
Contributing factors were the town’s 50-50 sharing of the US$6 million construction of a two-mile spur from the CPKC main line. The Alberta government also contributed US$1.5 million to the project. CPKC is also partnering with Americold in a US$79 million cold storage complex at the port city of Saint John, N.B.
