Rail traffic down for the week
I just came across the Association of American Railroads’ (AAR) website and found it to have excellent information regarding rail traffic in North America. For anyone interested, the AAR puts out a weekly traffic and carloading report for rail movements in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The latest weekly update shows that U.S railroads originated 248,391 cars during the week ending April 11th; a decrease of 24.5 percent compared to the same week during 2008. Major reasons cited for the decrease are the global economic difficulties and the Easter holiday.
Overall, rail traffic isn’t immune to the current economic recession:
Combined North American rail volume for the first 14 weeks of 2009 on 14 reporting U.S., Canadian and Mexican railroads totaled 4,784,613 carloads, down 17.7 percent from last year, and 3,238,948 trailers and containers, down 15.6 percent from last year.
I don’t get involved with domestic rail freight other than inbound ocean containers moving on a through bill of lading into inland points, but I did find the information provided by the AAR very informative. I will be checking back periodically and providing feedback where relevant.
You can check out the AAR’s 2009 press releases here.
Kevin on Mon, 20th Apr 2009 6:59 pm
Rail traffic continues to be down for a variety of reasons and I do not see it coming back anytime soon. One provider had told me they had multiple hundreds of miles in empty cars sitting idle.
Right now transportation companies cannot take out capacity fast enough to match the lowering demand.
3plwire on Mon, 20th Apr 2009 9:46 pm
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for the insight. It is very similar to what we are seeing in the ocean container market. Hope things are going well for you.