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A long line of tractor-trailers and other trucks snaked up the road leading to CN’s Chappell Yard on Wednesday afternoon, their progress slowed by a small group of picketing workers walking back and forth.

One truck driver whose rig was near the front of the line said he had been waiting to get into the rail yard for about an hour; a picketer said they are letting trucks enter and leave the yards every few minutes.

Asked about the incident with the truck, the picketer said there have been “quite a few.”

There was some delight on the line when a woman wearing a United Food and Commercial Workers bib showed up to distribute cups of hot soup, an apparent act of solidarity from one union to another.

Within hours of the strike being called, Saskatchewan agricultural groups and the provincial government were calling on Ottawa to take “immediate action” — presumably by recalling parliament to pass back-to-work legislation and end the strike.

“It can’t go very long. It really can’t,” Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister Dave Marit told reporters in Regina on Tuesday.

“I mean, as I said, we’re coming off one of our biggest harvests ever, with a fall that we’ve never seen before. This is a time when farmers are selling their product and moving it,” he said.

“We also have to really be concerned about our country’s reputation and delivering product to other countries. It’s been at stake before and it could be at risk again.”

The federal government has in the past used back-to-work legislation, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was not in the cards during the brief Canadian Pacific Ltd. railway strike in May 2018.