RECOVERY IN RAIL TRAFFIC CONTINUES
The recovery in rail traffic continued this week as total originations jumped 10% year over year and intermodal traffic jumped 14.2%. Commodities remain extremely strong with 9 segments reporting double digit growth (via AAR):
The Association of American Railroads (AAR) today reported that weekly rail traffic remains up over 2009 levels with U.S. railroads originating 286,391 carloads for the week ending Dec. 11, 2010, up 10.2 percent compared with the same week last year. Intermodal traffic for the week totaled 233,935 trailers and containers, up 14.1 percent compared with the same week in 2009, with container volume up 15.9 percent and trailer volume up 6.4 percent.Fifteen of the 19 carload commodity groups increased from the comparable week in 2009.
Commodities posting double digit gains in loadings included: metallic ores, up 98.6 percent; metals and products, up 28.7 percent; farm products excluding grain, up 27.1 percent; stone, clay and glass products, up 24.3 percent; crushed stone, sand and gravel, up 22.3; petroleum products, up 17 percent; lumber and wood products, up 16.3 percent; coal, up 10.5 percent; and chemicals, up 10.3 percent. Commodities reporting declines included non-metallic minerals, down 14.4 percent; grain mill products, down 5.7 percent; motor vehicles and equipment, 5.2 percent; and primary forest products, down 2.7 percent.
Carload volume on Eastern railroads was up .7 percent compared with last year. In the West, carload volume was up 16.9 percent compared with the same week in 2009.
For the first 49 weeks of 2010, U.S. railroads reported cumulative volume of 14,052,248 carloads, up 7.1 percent from last year, and 10,718,006 trailers or containers, up 14.3 percent from the comparison week in 2009.
Source: AAR
Stats like this make me wish I followed it more, esp. given Buffett’s emphasis on such indicators.
I am outright “qualitatively” guessing here- given the enormous coal cargo on rail, could we assume that rail info. is not necessarily reflective of domestic economic demand, rather than int’l demand (like China) for such commodites? again, I have no data supporting this thought.
I had a conversation about a year ago with a dock foreman from Long Beach, CA (one of the biggest ports in the nation). This is exactly what he was saying. Without words like “qualitatively”, that is. Lots of “out”, especially coal and iron ore, not much “in”. ‘Course, that was a year ago.
Maybe if we’re lucky we can become another Australia or Canada, and raw-material export our way out of our malaise. (Exaggerated, of course, Canada isn’t as much an exporter as people seem to think; in fact, their #1 exporter is us.)
Containers and commodities show the largest increase. This is export (China) driven. Good news for all as long as they keep building empty cities.