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 reported on 10/1/2021. Here is a summary of the most recent portion of the data RSI released for the current quarter and trailing

  4th Quarter 2021 3rd Quarter 2021
Orders 13,477 8,607
Deliveries 8,161 8,298

This is a great development. There has been a significant decline in railcar acquisition in both the primary and secondary markets for the past couple of years and hopefully this signals a clear and permanent change in the marketplace and the confidence this implies of rail freight traffic in the future is sustained.

From RSI: “The Railway Supply Institute (RSI) is a trade association representing more than 160 companies involved in the manufacture of products and services in the freight car, tank car, locomotive, maintenance-of-way, communications and signaling, and passenger rail industries.”