On February 28th, the US Department of Justice Antitrust Division filed comments with the Surface Transportation Board regarding the proposed rulemaking that would require reciprocal switching by railroads. This proposed rule would require a railroad that serves an...
Rapidly approaching, the US Surface Transportation Board is scheduled to hold a hearing in mid-March regarding its proposed new “reciprocal switching regulations”. This proposed rule would require a railroad that serves an industry (with no competing railroad...
We’ve all been watching the news recently about truckers protesting Canada’s mandates, but there does not seem to be the same issue with the rail freight industry. Why is that? Joanna Marsh of Freightwaves, published an article on Sunday (13th) that provides part of...
Rising Orders for New Railcars: Last week the Railway Supply Institute (RSI) released statistics regarding railcar orders, deliveries and backlog at manufacturing facilities. Notably, the backlog in production was 42,993 units on 1/1/2022, over 5,000 above that...
In mid-January, the Surface Transportation Board (STB) released its “Annual Rail Rate Index Study: 1985-2019, which distills data and analysis of freight rail rates into formal reports that are shared with the Board and the public.” STB’s report contains a number of...
Another unfortunate sign of the state of our economy became visible a few days ago as the Association of American Railroads (AAR) released freight rail traffic for the beginning of 2022. AAR noted that total rail traffic was down 6.6% for the week ending January 15th,...
In case you did not see it, during the past week a journalist published an article complete with dramatic photographs showing hundreds of packages looted and opened from rail-carried shipping containers in Los Angeles. The images are so striking that it is hard to...
This week’s posting will be brief; we are looking forward to 2022 and hope it brings success to all of our participants. As it does even during holiday weeks, The American Association of Railroads (AAR) last week posted the most recent week’s freight rail traffic – in...
During this past week, AAR reported freight rail traffic for December and for the week ending January 1st. For the month of December, total carloads were up by 3.1% as compared to the same month in 2020. However, total intermodal units were down 8.2%, as compared to...
It has been a few weeks since we looked at rail freight traffic in the U.S., and last week the American Association of Railroads (AAR) released data for the week ending December 18th, as compared to the same week last year (2020). Here is a summary of their report;...
