RAIL TRAFFIC – STILL POSTING MODEST GROWTH
No big changes in the rail trends this week. Growth is still modest in intermodal with the 10 week moving average at 3.7%. Not bad, but not great. Overall consistent with a growing, but sluggish economy. The AAR has details:
“The Association of American Railroads (AAR) today reported mixed weekly rail traffic for the week ending May 5, 2012, with U.S. railroads originating 276,136 carloads, down 2 percent compared with the same week last year. Intermodal volume for the week totaled 239,031 trailers and containers, up 3 percent compared with the same week last year.
Fourteen of the 20 carload commodity groups posted increases compared with the same week in 2011, with petroleum products, up 47 percent; motor vehicles and equipment, up 31.2 percent, and lumber and wood products, up 23.1. The groups showing a decrease in weekly traffic included grain, down 22.7 percent; farm products excluding grain, down 11.9 percent, and coal, down 10.1 percent.
Weekly carload volume on Eastern railroads was down 1.7 percent compared with the same week last year. In the West, weekly carload volume was down 2.3 percent compared with the same week in 2011.
For the first 18 weeks of 2012, U.S. railroads reported cumulative volume of 5,068,331 carloads, down 3.2 percent from the same point last year, and 4,114,427 trailers and containers, up 2.8 percent from last year.”
Cullen Roche
Mr. Roche is the Founder of Orcam Financial Group, LLC. Orcam is a financial services firm offering research, private advisory, institutional consulting and educational services.
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2 Comments
Thank you
The information you shared is very informative.
“Rail Traffic”
Cullen, is there a way to extrapolate out of the rail traffic report the amount of North Dakota Oil that is used to ship to market?
I know a few people that claim there are a steady flow of (Berkshire Hathaway Owned)rail cars up there hauling to market. (No Wonder Obama disses pipelines..lol)
I did find this report from last year,
“According to the North Dakota Pipeline
Authority, pipeline capacity is not expected
to keep pace with production until early
2013, leaving incremental volumes to find
alternative transportation methods, primarily
rail, which was capable of hauling 115,000
bbl/d day last year. Railroads are projected
to accommodate 222,000 bbl/d by 2013,
according to the NDPA.”
http://www.rgldenergy.com/sites/default/files/news_0211oilboom.pdf
That’s about 168 Tankers a day and is steadily increasing through this year by almost double.
So in a nutshell, can this output in capacity masked weakness in many other areas of the overall rail based economy?