MONTREAL, (May 16, 2005) — Almost 2,000 Canadian National Railway locomotive engineers will hit the bricks on Wednesday, the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference announced.

The union said about 1,700 CN engineers across Canada will launch a strike one minute after midnight May 18, after negotiations with the railway failed late last week.

The engineers want wage and benefits improvements. Their previous agreement with CN expired at the end of 2003.

“CN remains optimistic that it can reach an agreement with the TCRC without labour disruption, although no further negotiations are scheduled,” the company stated.

CN also says it has a contingency plan in place to maintain core freight operations in the event of a strike. However, as shipping and transport-related industries have seen before, the strike is expected to cause massive freight service disruptions across the country, leading to possible back-to-work legislation.

But as Canadian Press rightly observed in a report, back-to-work action may be hard to achieve in a bitterly divided Parliament, and would add to the political woes faced by the minority Liberal government.

Bob Ballantyne, president of the shipper group the Canadian Industrial Transportation Association, told CP he’s skeptical that CN could keep up with the shipping demand if the workers go on strike.

A year ago, 5,000 CN clerical, customer service, and intermodal yard employees — about one third of CN’s total workforce — went on a month-long strike, disrupting freight movement and shipping ports across Canada.

Trucking carriers with capacity to spare scrambled to pick up the available freight. While carriers dependant on intermodal services experienced service disruptions, several other carriers told Today’s Trucking they saw a jump in volumes as frustrated shippers began to shift freight from rail to trucks in order to meet delivery times.

Meanwhile, CN said it had reached a tentative four-year contract with Teamsters-represented locomotive engineers in its northern Quebec territory.

— with files from Canadian Press