No big changes in rail traffic this week. Carloads continue to post small declines and intermodal continues to post improvements. Intermodal is up to 7% on a year over year basis with the 10 week moving average coming out to 4.5% this week. That’s up marginally from 4.2% last week. The AAR has details on this week’s data:
“AAR today also announced mixed weekly rail traffic for the week ending June 30, 2012, with U.S. railroads originating 278,634 carloads, down 2.5 percent compared with the same week last year. Intermodal volume for the week totaled 253,497 trailers and containers, up 7 percent compared with the same week last year and the fifth highest-volume intermodal week ever for U.S. railroads.
Nine of the 20 carload commodity groups posted increases compared with the same week in 2011, with petroleum products, up 51.8 percent; motor vehicles and equipment, up 18.5 percent, and lumber and wood products, up 11.9 percent. The groups showing a decrease in weekly traffic included grain, down 16.6 percent, and farm products excluding grain, down 16.8 percent.
Weekly carload volume on Eastern railroads was down 10 percent compared with the same week last year. In the West, weekly carload volume was up 2.7 percent compared with the same week in 2011.
For the first 26 weeks of 2012, U.S. railroads reported cumulative volume of 7,324,818 carloads, down 2.9 percent from the same point last year, and 6,049,730 trailers and containers, up 3.3 percent from last year.”
(Chart provided by pragcap.com)
Mr. Roche is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Discipline Funds.Discipline Funds is a low fee financial advisory firm with a focus on helping people be more disciplined with their finances.
He is also the author of Pragmatic Capitalism: What Every Investor Needs to Understand About Money and Finance, Understanding the Modern Monetary System and Understanding Modern Portfolio Construction.
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