I was stunned. Couldn't fathom what possible benefit could be achieved via spending all that cash on train transport just to play a game of "let's pretend we're a very busy little boy."
Just look at this quote from an internal e-mail from the railraod's managemnt:
“This unit train will move at least once daily to Port Huron starting on Tuesday, June 18,” said an email written by Teresa Edwards, CN’s manager of transportation for Port Huron/Sarnia.
It will “clear customs and return to Sarnia. If we can get in more flips back and forth we will attempt to do so. Each move per car across the border is Revenue generated for Sarnia/Port Huron. “It will be the same cars flipping back and forth and the product will stay on the car.”
The email ends with a reminder that the move “has the potential to make a lot of money for CN so need everyone’s assistance to maximize the number of trips that we make and ensure that it all moves smooth.”
So I am assuming she --or one of her superiors-- was instructed by the biodiesel company to do this. So in the proper spirit of "follow the money" the proper question here is: why did this biodiesel company want to do this??
My answer:
They were trying to pad the numbers.
They decided back in May or June that they needed to come up with lots and lots of bills of lading and border crossing documents which would give the illusion of supprting an outrageously over-inflated number pointing to how much biodiesel they were able to ship during the month of June, 2012.
There was a huge wad of wool they needed to pull over someone's eyes somewhere concerning VOLUME. And I further suspect that because they did it during the month of June, that maybe they needed to have those numbers on the books before the end of June, which is the end of the fiscal year.
Just my hunch.
::ETA::
I need to make one addition to my theory, which is that instead of this biodiesel company needing to be able to come up with the "right" documdents themselves, I instead believe they needed to trip all the right flags at the border crossing and make the border agents generate specific types of paperwork within their own record keeping systems. Specifically, I suspect that the biodiesel company wanted the border and customs people on both the US and Canadian side of the border to generate the "right" kinds of paperwork within their own respective internal beurocracies --the kind of paperwork that gets referred to by American and Canadian policy-makers. And the reason they needed to trick the border and customs people into doing this is because of some very critical decisions that are going to be made in the immediate future regarding the transport of oil across the Canada/US border.
See my Post #10 below.