CALGARY, Alberta — Minnesota’s Elbow Lake Co-op Grain and Cargill Elva of Manitoba are CPKC’s grain Elevators of the Year for the 2023-24 crop year, the railroad has announced.
The award recognizes grain customers for moving high volume from a single loading point while demonstrating efficient railcar loading and a strong commitment to safety.
The award is the third straight for Elbow Lake Co-op Grain, located in the town of the same name about 160 miles northwest of Minneapolis and 80 miles southeast of Fargo, N.D. It had the highest tonnage on the railroad’s U.S. north network with more than 543,000 metric tons. It took advantage of the expanded CPKC network with multiple trains of corn to Mexico.
“We’re very happy to be recognized by CPKC for our performance for the third year in a row. It’s really a joint effort between Elbow Lake Co-op Grain, the customers who support our business and the CPKC railroad,” Kevin Stein, Elbow Lake general manager, said in a press release.
Cargill Elva is located in Melita, Man., about 60 miles southwest of Brandon, Man. It won the award for the first time, moving more than 450,000 metric tons of grain.
“We appreciate CPKC’s recognition of our team’s efforts in Elva who work every day to provide farmers with safe, reliable access to markets for their grain around the world,” said Jeff Vassart, president, Cargill Limited. “Cargill continues to make significant investments in our grain elevator and canola processing facilities to serve Canadian farmers, and we are excited to open our new Canola processing facility in Regina later this year.”
To me what is impressive about Elbow Lake is that the facility has fairly constrained rail infrastructure. No balloon track, and limited number of storage tracks and not a whole lot of headroom on the load out. It looks like they have to run 10-20 car cuts at a time through the load out.