Weekly Rail Carloading Report - Week 27, 2008

There is an interesting report available on the web that is "A Weekly Report of North American Rail Freight Traffic by Major Railroad and Commodity." It is currently showing data for week 27 of 2008. Take a look.

http://railfax.transmatch.com/

Here is an example of the information available on this web site. This graph shows Total Traffic for 2007-2008 vs. 2006-2007. There are more graphs and tables on the web site showing data by railroad and by commodity.



Note: This web site has new tables and graphs every Thursday. So, if I am late or miss a week with this blog posting, you can check for new data on Thursdays.

In the chart above you will note that Total Rail Traffic for 2008 (blue line) is running behind that for 2007 (green line). There is a table on the web site referenced above that breaks down the total traffic by commodity groups, and this table shows that some groups are up this year and some groups are down. Here is that breakdown.

Major Commodity Groups – 2008 YTD vs. 2007 YTD

• Total (1.1%)
• Grain 15.5%
• Chemicals 2.3%
• Food 1.6%
• Forest (11.3%)
• Metals (2.3%)
• Coal 3.0%
• Autos (14.6%)
• Intermodal (3.1%)

There is much more data on the Railfax web site. Take a look.