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The fun & fascinating stories of Supply Chain & Logistics.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:00:03] Hi, my name is Bryndis Whitson, and you're listening to the Zebras to Apples podcast. The fun and fascinating stories of supply chain logistics. Every town and city it feels like has a train going through it. Countries were built and connected by the railway. In Canada, $380 billion of goods are moved each year by rail, and it supports at least 188,000 jobs. In the United States, it's almost $900 billion and 120,399 employees as of September 2024. In this podcast, I chat with my friend and railroader Trish Slivinski. Trish worked for one of Canada's Class one railways, CP Rail, now known as CP KC, for 29 years and continues to work in the rail industry. We see trains coming and going through our community, but rarely do we know where they are going or what they what they are carrying. Please join me in my conversation with Trish Slivinski and learn a little bit more about the railway and the trains going through your community.
Bryndis Whitson: Okay, so I'm here with Trish and we're talking about supply chain logistics. Trish has a really fascinating background from everything in rail but also in sales and so many different things that we'll kind of get into, so welcome.
Trish Slivinski: [00:00:57] Thank you, Bryndis. Thanks for having me. This is great.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:01:00] Let's start at a basic thing of, how did you get into this kind of field in general?
Trish Slivinski: [00:01:06] I think it was just my first job. I was in Winnipeg, I had left home to go to University of Manitoba, I took my Bachelor of Science in math and graduated. Before I graduated, I was looking for a summer job. I had gone back home, a couple of years done work at home. Then I'm like, no, I really want to stay and applied for this job at the rail. My friend's dad worked at the office and that started me in my rail job. That was based in intermodal, which at the time I didn't know much about rail. There was different options, but intermodal is the containers that travel on a rail car, and you see those containers being delivered by a truck on the last mile. We loaded those railcars with the containers, and we did at the time also have these trucks that backed onto cars, which they called piggyback, but they don't have that anymore. So you could tell how old I am.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:02:12] Not that old.
Trish Slivinski: [00:02:13] Well anyways, they backed those things down, what they called a circus ramp. I was able to, because I worked quite a few nights and stuff, so I was able to practice my backing up. I've backed up a semi down one of those tracks. I've also used one of those packer machines that places the containers on the railcars. There was a lot of little things that I got to experience when I was there. I worked there ten years, basically through my degree. Then they transferred me, so I got to go to Vancouver from Winnipeg. I spent some time in intermodal there. Then they transferred me to Calgary, where you find me now. The thing about the railway is, it's like a large company and there's so many different opportunities at different areas that I was able to use my schooling, use some of my experience and get different jobs. For me, that was what kept me there and kept me interested. They placed me in a role every couple of years, which just kept everything so interesting to me. I was in finance, I did accounting, I did service design, designed the train schedules. Then I ended up in an operations group at the very end planning coal trains, which was so different as well, but very interesting.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:03:49] Math is such a big piece that people don't normally think of.
Trish Slivinski: [00:03:54] No. I mean, the whole world of analytics is now blown up exponentially with AI and stuff. But very driven in the railway, the math.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:04:07] Completely. Even the way the train car is loaded and where you place it within the entire factor.
Trish Slivinski: [00:04:17] Different, and the scheduling of them and everything. You hear them talk about an integrated operating plan or whatever they call it, the hunter ages. It's true, it is all kind of math based. That's kind of where that all started.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:04:37] Actually, you just mentioned something where you were working in intermodal, and I thought maybe we just start a basic level of, what is intermodal? Just for those that are new to the area of it.
Trish Slivinski: [00:04:51] An intermodal is definitely booming right now. Well, I should say it's kind of fluxed in the last year, but it's certainly one method of transport that could replace the truck. An over the road truck. Maybe in the future we don't see as many trucks moving from Vancouver to Toronto. We get those on the rail and rail is greener, right? There's more containers per locomotive using less fuel to run across country. It is a green option, and I don't think people, right now, aren't necessarily incentivized to know that. They're interested in the 'just in time' and 'when's that going to be delivered' and the whole origin destination scheduling. If you step back a little bit to intermodal system and putting that on a train, that's just going from origin to destination without any stops could actually be quite close to your over the road truck. Of course, you have one guy driving a truck and he's got to stop and he's got to sleep, whereas you got engineers and conductors changing at every switch point, and the train keeps moving, essentially. So it is a train that's scheduled. Railway will say it's five days to origin point, pick up at 21:00 when the container can drop off at the origin and pick up at the destination. It's all scheduled and just have to worry about that last mile, delivering it to the customer. It's a good mode of transport. I don't know that we necessarily utilize that fully yet in Canada, which we should be since we're such a vast country.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:06:53] There's so many of those pieces that we can build into everything, too.
Trish Slivinski: [00:06:58] That's one mode. I also worked with CN recently on this MTT tray, mobile transportation tray, which actually tries to make car load, which is like a different mode of transportation. Car load or a truck that's carrying ,say, a bunch of pipes, or maybe it's structural steel. You put that on the tray, secure it on the tray, and then the tray slides into the container. That then, basically, turns that into an intermodal option. That could potentially take the trucks off the road as well. It really didn't get off the ground with CN, and they still have some around and there's some people still using it. I know they have a company that's going to Mexico with them, for parts for Mexican vehicles. There's different ways of getting the product into those containers that's also helpful. So that the securement is safe and if it's heavier it's secured properly. That's intermodal in a nutshell. The opposite to intermodal, carload, is an individual car is going to make its way onto a train with other cars. Then that might have more stops. You don't go from Toronto to Vancouver, you would have to go Toronto into Thunder Bay, do some switching into Winnipeg, do some switching into Moose Jaw do some switching, and then make your way out west. And the car load, you're just looking at one car, or maybe several cars together, but usually just one car in a train of multiple other different commodities.
Trish Slivinski: [00:08:50] You'd have a mixture of, whether it's tank cars, grain cars, maybe a few intermodals, maybe some auto cars. You'll see auto cars sometimes on those trains, but mostly the auto cars would go on an intermodal train, just because they need to get there quickly. So that car load is a little bit slower. It's still a good mode of transport. Recently I've found that people have naturally moved away a little bit from car load just because of the truck pricing. How they used to price car load is that, usually it was cheaper to put your stuff on the rail, and that rail car would hold up from anywhere from 3 to 4 truckloads to one rail car. But now the rail pricing has gone up in comparison to the truck pricing, which has gone the other way, lowered. It's not as economical for people to be shipping a carload rail car lately. Some plants are moving away from that, and there's a possible need for shifting of that. If you look at it, that car load is also a greener option. To put those four trucks off the road and into the rail car. But they don't incentivize it that way. Diesel price is what it is, and there's a good supply of truckers and trucking that will take those loads. So that's car load in a nutshell.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:10:35] I think it's really neat because there's all of those different terminologies that you get used to. It's more just like, okay. Then it's also this piece and that piece, too. I was even listening to something, they were talking about e-cargo bikes and they were talking about even payload for cargo bikes. All of the different pieces that we don't normally necessarily think about, but the weight, the distribution, all of those pieces are so critical and movement is everything.
Trish Slivinski: [00:11:12] That's why it's highly regulated. The AR takes the majority of the brunt with that and regulates how they load those railcars and how much we ship and how they secure it, etc.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:11:28] Do you have a time that you can think of that was a really fun, neat moment of something that was a little challenging, but it worked out and you're like, that was a lot of fun. Or you look at something as you're driving by like, I had a piece in that.
Trish Slivinski: [00:11:50] Yeah, my last company, previous employer, we did steel for the BMO Center at Calgary Stampede. Now, I think every time that I go in there, that I'm going to think about that, for sure. That was a lot of structural steel.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:12:07] Oh, I bet.
Trish Slivinski: [00:12:08] Yeah, year's worth. So that's kind of cool. I did a single car load of two really big reels that went from Port of Montreal into the oil and gas sector here in Alberta. Those big reels were heavy and over dimensional for the rail car so that was pretty cool, too. I took pictures, and that was a special moment to get that all together.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:12:35] Especially from Montreal to here. Over dimensional. So much larger than what is normally expected, and all of the different places. Luckily, but probably still tricky going from Montreal to here. You don't have the mountains, but you still got the shield. You still got other factors.
Trish Slivinski: [00:13:00] Well, there's tunnels. There's tunnels in Ontario there in the northern portion where I'm from. There's quite a few tunnels and a lot of sharp curves around Lake Superior, so that would be some of the challenges for the rail, for sure.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:13:15] But it got here and that's the neat thing.
Trish Slivinski: [00:13:16] It was neat, yeah. Just to see the cranes setting up too is kind of cool. I like the cranes and watching them lift that off the railcar, then you have to have the truck ready and get the truck ready and get that guy going. All the permitting, all that stuff, it's complicated.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:13:35] Very complicated. And the permitting, oh my goodness.
Trish Slivinski: [00:13:37] That takes weeks. It's not something that you can do overnight. So lots of preparation and planning.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:13:46] It's not one thing you can do just tomorrow. It's a very long period of time where you have to look at the entire planning pieces.
Trish Slivinski: [00:13:56] Good thing that the rail isn't lightning. It took some time to get there.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:14:00] Yeah, very cool.
Trish Slivinski: [00:14:03] That was one good moment. There's certainly a lot of different things. I worked in the rail, it was always every day doing the coal train planning was kind of interesting, because at the time there was 21 coal trains cycling back and forth from Crow's Nest Pass, or through Cranbrook, into the Port of Vancouver, Roberts Bank or West Shore. There was always something going sideways or not quite working. It was always a surprise every day, oh there's nothing. Nothing happened last night, it's all good. That was a good surprise, but it definitely opens your eyes to how many things it takes in order to get a train moving on the road. Whether it's crews, locomotives, the product, the railcars, whatever it is, the track, there's always something that was a challenge every day.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:15:08] That doesn't even include weather.
Trish Slivinski: [00:15:12] No, weather was in there too.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:15:15] I bet weather sometimes can have those impacts.
Trish Slivinski: [00:15:20] Look at you know what happened last fall. We had fires, the flooding, and then we had the port strikes. The three there really took a hit to a lot of businesses in the fall of last year. It was a struggle last year, and to fix that and move forward was challenging to get the business back.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:15:45] Oh, completely. So when you think of other moments within your career, different things like that, what have you really loved? What do you think of like, that was a really neat project.
Trish Slivinski: [00:16:01] I think that my biggest project when I was at the rail was the strike plan. I don't know if that's, probably, nothing that anyone has ever talked about publicly, really. But everyone knows that it happens. The railway still functions when they have a strike. If people don't know that, then here's the thing. We still run trains. We did it with managers. The project I worked on was track, so the track maintenance people were on strike. We fully trained over 1500 employees on different things that they weren't used to doing. We put them out on the track across the country, and we actually didn't even think that it would happen, that we'd actually have to deploy. We thought, we're just making a big plan, and we're going to write it in a book and it's just going to sit on a shelf somewhere. But then the negotiations went sideways and, lo and behold, we were out and running trains for three weeks without those unionized workers. It was successful because we didn't have any delays, we didn't have any incidences, no one was hurt. We were able to put the employees out in the field for two weeks and then bring them home and have replacement employees. All around, it worked out good. I think that was one of the first times that they actually had a full fledged plan so that they could have a contingency. I think it worked. They were very happy about that, because obviously they probably got what they wanted out of the negotiation, too. That was probably a separate thing, but they certainly were able to work. I think the customers, in the end, that's what they want. They want to see that their product is moving. I mean, they care about the strike and the unionized workers, but ideally they want their product.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:18:09] It's that balancing act in those ways, but also maintaining the system and stuff like that. Showing that you need contingency plans, because a strike is one thing, there could be a whole bunch of other factors that suddenly come into a mix.
Trish Slivinski: [00:18:26] They now plan for derailments and track washouts and things like that. They have people that are stationed at points across the country that are potential 'worst places'. They're ready to jump when that happens. So they do have contingency all over the place. I don't know if all other companies do that, but certainly I know the railways do that.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:18:56] Very cool.
Trish Slivinski: [00:18:57] It is kind of cool.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:18:59] It's a neat kind of piece, too.
Trish Slivinski: [00:19:01] It's all part of logistics. They got to do that as well, they got to plan for the worst and those people have to be at the ready.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:19:11] Just on a side note, when you say logistics, it brings in what we were talking about a few minutes ago, just before we started this. What we were talking about was more about how logistics is in everything. How some of your volunteering, and how much the logistics are involved in hockey tournaments, or major world events. I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about that.
Trish Slivinski: [00:19:43] I'm pretty involved in the hockey community, a lot of people know me from there. I found a little niche in the whole time keeping thing, and it's just something I wanted to do. I have always liked to time keep. I look back and I've done that since I was 12, so it's not something that's new to me. Lately, I've been trying to train people to do it, but I haven't been very successful in training my future people. I do have a couple of young guys that I work with and they're starting to get better. It is something I might want to trade up for later. So I have that, and I've always been interested. I ended up volunteering at a couple of really neat events. One was the U18 female championship here at Winsport. That was one of the first ones. Maybe I went to the IIHF in Kamloops first. So there's IIHF Worlds in Kamloops one year and I decided. I had some holidays, I'm like, what am I going to do on my holidays? I'm like, I'll just trailer my bike out to Kamloops and I'll work at this tournament for the week, because why wouldn't I want to do that? I took the motorcycle and it was March, so it was actually really nice. It was 20 degrees every day in Kamloops, it was beautiful weather. You couldn't ask for anything more. I stayed in the little hotel that all the Team Canada parents stayed in. I got to go every day. I was in the ticket office. I knew nothing about tickets or money or anything like that. But they thought that one might be a good place for me. I sold tickets and met some really nice people. Riley Wiwchar, who is now, I told you that he was the chairperson for the Grey Cup in Vancouver. He was in charge of that, just because he was in the hockey community in Kamloops. That's where he was from. Now he's chairing the Grey Cup. We had fun in Kamloops, and that brought me to when they had it here just after Covid. 2021, they had the World Women's here, and I volunteered as a timekeeper at that tournament. You're right, logistics plays a huge role. It seems to be in my daily life, getting bikes out to Kamloops.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:22:28] Well, even that is a whole other piece in itself.
Trish Slivinski: [00:22:31] Trailer is still parked at home. It's ready for its next adventure.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:22:38] You were saying that you were the manager of managers, and there was those little logistics, too.
Trish Slivinski: [00:22:44] Even that, you had to manage the team's manager who was providing snacks for the teams, providing clean laundry, providing anything else that's needed. Whether it's supplies or skate sharpening or hotel or something for their parents. On and on, it kind of goes around. They do have cleaning services there, but someone had to always be there to throw the laundry in and take the laundry out and make sure everyone's getting use of the machines and all that. The logistics was anything from laundry to food to just suggestions of where to go for food. It was a big job. Lots of walking, putting on a lot of steps on my pedometer.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:23:39] It's in everything which leads to, you were talking about how, when we look at your career, you worked for the railway for a number of years, and then you transitioned to more working for other companies that deal with the rails.
Trish Slivinski: [00:23:59] Still in rail, but I did work for Colas for a bit and they merged into McAsphalt. I was doing the rail logistics for them, still oil and gas related. Getting that asphalt from the facility, the Suncor, the IOL, wherever it was, to their site in order to mix and blend the asphalt, because they don't just pour that asphalt on the roads. They mix it with other chemicals, which makes the asphalt into different grades at the end for different applications. You'd have different asphalt on the airport runway than you would have on the roads. I did that for a number of years. I also worked, after that, with a company schooler, which was grain logistics and specialty crops and moving rye and all that. That's mostly overseas, but there was some domestic stuff because some of the rye goes to the distilleries in the States.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:25:07] Oh, of course it would. Now that you think about it, yeah.
Trish Slivinski: [00:25:12] The grain business was interesting as well, because at the railway, I never really got into that grain group. But when I was at schooler, it was grain into railcars going to the coast and unloading and possibly going on to a ship or into containers to go onto a ship to get shipped out. Or bagged and going down to a distillery somewhere in Kentucky.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:25:39] Also making sure that it's getting to the right facility in Vancouver and not the other facility.
Trish Slivinski: [00:25:47] You got both coasts, too, because they shipped grain at both coasts. Montreal as well as Vancouver. I know it's farther to get to Montreal, but sometimes if you're going to Europe or whatever, you want to go to the East Coast. That, and then I worked for the current company Kleysen, so that brought everything together. Transloading from rail to truck, from truck to rail, to truck to container, to rail to container, all different iterations of that. Overseas stuff, lots of oil and gas projects. My last big project was the BHP Jansen. I worked on some of that, there's some containers coming in from UAE with steel in it. UAE is now a major supplier of structural steel. They brought in, I don't know, 2000 containers.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:26:49] Just a few.
Trish Slivinski: [00:26:50] Yeah, just a few, and that's phase one. Phase two starts next year. There'll be an identical phase to that container business as well next year. I would love to go to Saskatchewan and see the potash mine.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:27:05] I would be so fascinated to go there.
Trish Slivinski: [00:27:09] I do like to see the end results. Just reflect on that and how all that stuff got there.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:27:18] That's the thing I love about trains, too. When I'm trying to randomly explain it to someone, I'm like, that's a unit car train, and that's a such and such, and this one is all potash. This one's all potash, and it's going back and forth.
Trish Slivinski: [00:27:34] Lots of potash. That's supposed to be one of the greenest facilities. I don't know how they're going to run that. If they're doing that solar or wind or whatever, but they're trying to do it with an environmental aspect in mind. So that'll be interesting to see in the future. They got another few years yet.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:27:59] Even with trains, too, there's so many different types of train cars and types of ways that they interact with the system. We were talking about potash, part of the reason potash is because the entire company is paying for that shipment. But I wonder if there's also the fact that potash really should just stay together.
Trish Slivinski: [00:28:25] It's very driven by the customer. The customer has a ship coming in at the port and needs to be, I don't know how many trains would go in a ship. Maybe one, maybe more. But it has to be at that particular time at that port. The railway would get, there would be disincentives for them to be late and stuff. It's very watched and important for some of those customer trains, whether it's the potash or the grain or a lot of oil trains now too. The oil trains, I heard they had some sort of record volume in oil trains this year. The crude coming out of Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:29:11] So you got the train cars, you got the car loads, you've got the train car, the ones with the cars. You've got so many different types, the multi levels, you've got so many different types and I'll never forget when you were talking about the dimensional loads, the one time when I was looking and I got so excited because they were actually transporting the wind turbines.
Trish Slivinski: [00:29:38] First time I saw that was in Thunder Bay because, for some reason, the boats come in there. They load them onto those big rail cars, and the rail cars have a different coupler system so that the wind turbine can span more than one rail car and still have the ability to turn and rotate. They're a little bit specialized cars and specialized move, and that's definitely over dimensional as well.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:30:12] Probably not when you were growing up because you were focused on other things, but growing up in the Thunder Bay area, with the port being there.
Trish Slivinski: [00:30:22] There was 12 grain elevators when I was born. There's like 2 now. The port has drastically changed but they have been able to attract some of that stuff as far as the over dimensional and the ships coming in. I noticed last summer when I was there, there is cruise ship in Thunder Bay. I don't know where they cruise from.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:30:46] I'm going to have to look into that, it must be a cruise all the way around the Great Lakes. That would be fun, actually.
Trish Slivinski: [00:30:52] It would be. It's not your traditional Caribbean cruise.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:30:56] Let's go through the slow docks across the Welland Canal.
Trish Slivinski: [00:31:02] There's a different environment in Thunder Bay with the 12 grain. But they do well. Still booming, and their port, they've put a little bit of money into the actual Marina there. The Marina is starting to look nice. I was down there for lunch in the summertime, and it's quite beautiful. People parking their boats there. Some hotels, two hotels down there now.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:31:35] If you were talking to someone who was starting out in this industry and stuff like that, what would you tell them to look for? Or any advice that you would give people?
Trish Slivinski: [00:31:48] There's just so many opportunities, options, areas that they can look into. There's lots of options to pick up different skills from different businesses. When I look at students nowadays and people starting out, I don't think that they're necessarily long term employees like how when I was going through, and I was at the railway for 29 years. I don't think that that's definitely the way that everyone else is going right now. I think there's a big change, and the reason that there's a change is because there are so many options. Kids these days have a lot more. There's just so many options, and they don't know. So they have a lot more questions about, is this the right fit or what if I don't like it, all this stuff. But I say to just try it, and obviously it's not hard to go from one job to another because everyone's doing it. So why not just stick with that. You grow, and if you could find something that's different every time, you're growing and you're learning different things, and by the end of 2 or 3 tries you got a whole pocketful of different things that you know. Different sets of knowledge. Maybe it's different transportation modes. Maybe it's different actual products. Because there is a lot of different things. Like you said before, logistics is in everything. You don't really need to even look at a traditional transportation company anymore to find out that you need people that can specialize in logistics.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:33:34] That's the thing I love about supply chain and logistics, is that everything you touch, everything that you are part of is there.
Trish Slivinski: [00:33:50] Got there somehow.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:33:51] Exactly. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about was, what it was like to be a train conductor.
Trish Slivinski: [00:33:57] Because I look like a train conductor. For me, I never back down from a challenge. I'm adventurous. I'm pretty on the edge about things, usually. I do have a very strong will to accomplish things. The conductor thing was kind of like that. I would never pick that to do as a job ever in my life. But I'm like, how hard could it really be? I should probably, because everyone at the time was doing their manager conductor training. It was the first group and I'm like, I might as well just sign up first because why would I wait? That's my theory about things. It's like, why don't you just be the first one instead of the last one?
Bryndis Whitson: [00:34:53] Pave the trail.
Trish Slivinski: [00:34:54] My mother, she ruined me for life, I think, with all these little things that she's ingrained in me. That was it. I really wanted to accomplish that, and it was probably one of the most difficult things that I've done. For one, their rules for the rail are, you're talking about two 5 inch binders. It's not easy, and almost understandable, some of the stuff. It's like explaining to you how the air works in a train. I was just like, A, I don't care. I just want them to work. Do I need to know that they have the reservoir and this and that? I'm like, I don't know. To me, I'm not a mechanical person. Dean will tell you, I break everything at home and I never fix it. He has a big long list. I'm just not that mechanical person. That was probably the hardest part, because it's very physical and mechanical. The theory is very mechanical, and I just didn't get it. I could say that I did it, as in I passed my rules, I went out there and did the training. To me it's like, that was good enough. That was an accomplishment because I didn't think that I could ever do that. I did get to meet some great people that gave me some great training. They let me drive the train. I did this one little thing with this guy, we went out to Carseland and he let me back up the train and do this car switching. I was the engineer for the day and it was lots of fun.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:36:43] That would be, yeah.
Trish Slivinski: [00:36:44] I'm thinking maybe I missed my calling. Maybe I should have just skipped over the conductor stuff and done the engineering training. I might have been more successful at that. It was hard. Right now, anyone ever says anything about a conductor or engineer I'm just like, no, you don't understand. They work really hard, that's a hard job and they deserve our praise and appreciation for sure.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:37:13] This is actually a question, because I don't fully know the answer and I'm more curious. What is the difference between the conductor and the engineer?
Trish Slivinski: [00:37:21] The engineer drives the train. He's in charge of the engine and everything that's behind it. That it's working properly, that they're getting from point A to point B. He does still need to know everything that a conductor knows, but he's basically the one in charge of driving. The conductor does basically everything else. Is in charge of all the mechanical of the train, is in charge of all the paperwork. They're the manager of the train, per se. They got to take the paperwork, interpret the paperwork, and give that interpretation to the engineer. How long the train is, how heavy the train is, how many cars they have, what kind of commodities they have. Are they carrying any hazmat? Are they in the right spot? All this stuff is the, what do they call that, the frog? No, not the frog. The little thing on the back of the train, the end of train unit thing. I don't remember.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:38:17] The thing that used to be the caboose.
Trish Slivinski: [00:38:18] It used to be the caboose, it's no longer the caboose. Is that on, and is that tested? You got to test it. The conductor does a lot of physical work. If there's any sort of, say the brake line, like you said, if it's brake lines stuck or something happens with the brakes, you got to go back and check that. Maybe it's a coupler, you got to change a coupler. You would have to do all that work. When the train stops, you have to set all the brakes. You're going back and walking back how many cars and setting brakes. Like I said, it's very physical. I don't know, maybe not for me. Like I said, I wouldn't pick that job, but I was able to do it. There's some stuff about being a conductor that isn't necessarily made for someone of my stature. Smaller, shorter. I took the very first oil train that was going into USD hard to see their new cars coming up from a national rail car, I believe. We parked them in Bredenbury and we were going to overnight there. Went to go turn the first brake, and I couldn't even get up on the car. They had the ladder, was basically at my eye level, so five feet off the ground. I'm like, how the heck do you get up on the rail car?
Bryndis Whitson: [00:39:43] Yeah, that is a very good question.
Trish Slivinski: [00:39:45] Do I take a stool with me every rail car? The conductor I was training with was 6' or 7' or something, he was an absolute monster. He just went one foot up and he's up and down the cars in no time. So he did that work and I just went inside. I'm like, I can't even help you. I don't even know what to say.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:40:09] I see that completely, because my grandfather was an engineer on the railway, but he was like 6'5 or 6'4. It wasn't an issue for him.
Trish Slivinski: [00:40:22] A lot of things weren't necessarily safe to do. That was one thing that, my conductor stuff, that I was shaking my head going, I don't know why they made those cars like that.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:40:42] It's interesting that you mentioned safety, because the one thing I've really noticed in the various events, the various different things I've done over the years is, you can always tell someone, as they would say, grew up in the railway, or because the commitment to safety is the first thing. This is the entry points, this is the safety points, this is the muster points. It creates that different culture of safety that is ingrained.
Trish Slivinski: [00:41:09] I don't know how that's different than any other company because I haven't really seen other companies' safety programs. Or just the, I don't know what it is, culture. I've never seen it the same since I've been at the railway. I don't know what that is. It'd be interesting to know from a safety person, because I would think they would be the only ones that would know how to teach that or how that gets ingrained like that, because it does once you are a railroader. It's unfortunate, sometimes when you hear about the accidents and stuff, maybe that's the thing that makes the difference. It's your friends, it's your coworkers, and that's happened.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:42:00] It's a part of your community.
Trish Slivinski: [00:42:02] I thought about my friend Sheldon the other day, and Sheldon had an accident in Winnipeg Yard. That was just before I moved out of Winnipeg. I think they were still in Winnipeg. I went to Vancouver and he had an incident. He talks about it on a little YouTube video. If you wanted to look up Sheldon Nagy, you could see his little video. He injured his foot. First of all, I would say he's an amazing individual, because resilience is, that's a good term for him. He does everything that a normal person would do, with the prosthetic. It's pretty amazing. It's sad that had to happen, but you realize that when you're looking at that and you're like, that's my friend that happened to him, you also internalize that and you don't want that to happen to you. There's a whole other meaning to safety. I think that happens multiple times and then you just get this culture. I think that's how it happens. I still have friends like Sheldon, and there's some that aren't around that things happen to. They didn't have the opportunity to come back and learn from it.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:43:29] Even the different corporate cultures and stuff like that. From what I've heard from people who worked at CP around the same time as you, is how much of a family the organization felt.
Trish Slivinski: [00:43:44] When we had the previous leader, the one that I grew up with, basically from the start. To whatever it was, 2014, around there. I got to do some things that were fairly close with him as well. It was like a family. It was lots of little things, and it wasn't necessarily big flashy events or anything like sometimes they have now, but it was just an accumulation of little things and how you're treated.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:44:20] That creates that extra community, too. When we look at communities, too, when part of the reason, among various other events that we had. Back at the Van Horn Institute, one of them was Women in Supply Chain, and that's one of the various ways we met and those different communities.
Trish Slivinski: [00:44:41] I'm missing that right now, I wish we still had that.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:44:44] But it also creates that other community. Like when we first started, it was that realization how there's a lot more women in supply chain and it's been growing over the last number of years, but it's still not the majority or anywhere close to the majority.
Trish Slivinski: [00:45:05] No, I was the one female person in my office. There's definitely strides to go on the female side as far as diversity and inclusion in supply chain.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:45:17] But it also paves the way for others, too.
Trish Slivinski: [00:45:23] I try to do my part in that, too. I've still stayed close with the supply chain management people at state. I go to those industrial events and stuff like that just to maybe mentor a few students and try to get them supply chain jobs. Give them direction as to where they can go, what they can do, maybe even some resumes. Point them in the path for resume help. I'm not the resume writer, but in that direction. Or even just help with an interview or something like that. There's a couple of females that I met from that and actually responded to my, 'call me anytime'. Text me anything, ask me any questions, whatever. There was only two the last time that came back to me, and both of them got jobs shortly after I talked with them.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:46:22] That's wonderful to see.
Trish Slivinski: [00:46:24] It was, yeah. The one girl, she went to Korea. She was from Korea, and she brought me back this little makeup kit, a little lipstick and a little nail thing, real Korean thing. It was so cute. It's nice to make a difference to the younger generation, too. I think they struggle quite a bit because it's hard, obviously, to get employment and you don't have any education, or you have the education, but you don't have English as the first language. They're struggling with their grammar or whatever, and they put out a resume, but it's grammatically not correct. That was one of the girls. Just helping along that line, because they both were very good workers. The one had more of an IT background, she got a really good job at Adco. I can't remember if it's Adco or Enmax. I think it was Adco. The other one is working at Lowe's or Rona or something in the head office supply chain area.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:47:31] Which also showcases, just even in that sentence, how you can get a job within any different area, within supply chain. Even as you've showcased within your career of the different things you can do. You can go from here to here to here to here. You just take your experiences with you and it just builds on to something else, too.
Trish Slivinski: [00:47:54] I think that the kids have a good opportunity right now. It is a global market, and there's still stuff coming from all over the world to Canada. If they are an immigrant, and maybe there's something coming from their country that they can hook up and try to, that might be the start that they need into that.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:48:22] Those little pieces just add to so much about this industry. If you were talking to a complete stranger and say, I work in this kind of field, but you were trying to get them to fall in love with it as much as you do, what would you say?
Trish Slivinski: [00:48:44] That's a tough one, Bryndis. I don't know, rail is my thing. I've always been fascinated by it, I don't know what it was. It might have been trains going by my house when I was younger or whatever. I didn't have that family history in rail, but it really, to me, puts the whole country together. It pulls the whole country together, because there are two different railways and they go right across the country. It brings employment, it brings goods, it supplies a lot of that economics. I think it's just exciting. That's one of the oldest forms of transportation, yet it's still kind of modern. If I look at this whole green thing, if I look at saving on diesel or what we're gonna do with electric.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:49:43] The different types of locomotives.
Trish Slivinski: [00:49:45] Whatever we're going to do with trucking, I don't know what we're doing. If we're doing hydrogen vehicles or what.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:49:50] All of it, wide varieties.
Trish Slivinski: [00:49:52] Whatever that is. Electric trucks? I don't know, it's not going to get over the mountains in the winter. There's going to be something, but there's always going to be the rail. So I think that is something that people can look at for the future, too.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:50:06] Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. What I've always appreciated since we've known each other over the last ten or more years now, is your willingness to be there. You came to Winnipeg to help at a conference, you showed up. I really, really appreciate it. There's a love and a passion for just everything that I see from you.
Trish Slivinski: [00:50:47] Thank you. I try to live my life that way with everything.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:50:51] Exactly. Well, thank you so much.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:51:28] Thank you for listening to this Zebras to Apples podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed the showcase of the fun and fascinating stories of supply chain logistics. If you like this episode, I would love it if you could give it a rating and review. For more information about this topic, you can go to ZebrasToApples.com, or follow Zebras to Apples on the social media platform of your choosing, whether that's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn. You can support the show on Patreon. Also, check out the show notes below. Please join me again for another episode of Zebras to Apples. Have a wonderful day!