OTTAWA — About 5,000 Canadian National Railway workers walked off their jobs on Friday after last-ditch talks under a federal mediator failed and the railway said no further talks were planned.

Thirty-six hours of talks ended at 7.30 p.m. Thursday in Montreal "with no agreement in sight," according to a fax message sent by negotiators to members of the Canadian Auto Workers union.

CN said in a statement it would "keep trains rolling," on normal freight schedules, "with management staff performing key functions."

It warned, however, that shippers could experience delays.

"CN has no plans at this time for further discussions with the CAW," the railway said.

Gary Fane, the CAW's chief negotiator, said in the fax message that "the union is ready to resume meaningful negotiations at any time."

The CAW represents employees who on Jan. 23 voted to reject tentative contracts with shopcraft workers who repair and maintain locomotives and freight cars and perform safety inspections on trains; intermodal yard workers, who shift containers between truck and rail; customer service employees, whose Winnipeg, Manitoba, headquarters deals with all of CN's North American shippers; and clerical employees.

Union members rejected their leadership's contract recommendations on wage and other compensation grounds, and on what they perceive as harsh disciplinary measures and other treatment meted out by CN to employees in the past year or year-and-a-half, negotiator Abe Rosner said in an interview. They were angry with CN - and with the union for not representing them well enough on treatment issues - he said.

CN had no comment on any negotiating issue.

There are no federal plans to step in further, either by renewed conciliation proceedings or by Parliament passing back-to-work legislation.

"We are just monitoring the situation now," Denis D'Amour, a spokesman for federal Labor Minister Claudette Bradshaw, said in an interview from Moncton, New Brunswick. "We're at the limit of what we can do, for the moment."

Don Clark, director of the federal mediation and conciliation service, said his group would wait "until the parties want to get back to the bargaining table. The mediators will be in touch with the parties, to gauge when it might be appropriate to bring them back to the table. We're just waiting at this point."

With CN intent on maintaining operations and Canadian Pacific Railway operating normally, the CAW's Rosner said back-to-work legislation was unlikely any time soon. The last such federal legislation for CN and its workers came in 1995, when workers were locked out for eight days.