Week Ending 19May2012: Year-over-Year Growth Continues Without Coal

May 25th, 2012
in econ_news

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Econintersect: Week 20 of 2012 ending 19 May 2012 shows rail traffic is still below 2011 levels according to data released by the American Association of Railroads (AAR). However, excluding coal which is not an economic indicator, rail is expanding 3.5% year-over-year.

“Twelve of the 20 carload commodity groups posted increases compared with the same week in 2011, with petroleum products, up 49.4 percent; motor vehicles and equipment, up 23.3 percent, and lumber and wood products, up 17.9 percent. The groups showing a decrease in weekly traffic included nonmetallic minerals, down 16.3 percent; coal, down 16.1 percent, and coke, down 8.6 percent.”

Follow up:

A good background article on the switch of the power generating plants from coal to natural gas was published 30May2012 in the NYT.

The pattern in the data is the same as it has been for over recent months. The majority of the reason for the contraction is coal movements - which would only effect the profitability of railroads, and not an economic indicator as coal is an alternative fuel to oil and natural gas - U.S. production of those are up sharply in recent months. This week rail growth was strongly positive when coal was removed from the calculation

 

This Week
 Carloads Intermodal Total
This week Year-over-Year -5.0% 3.1% -3.9%
This week without coal
 3.5%
Year Cumulative to Date -3.4% 2.8% -2.5%

 

 

 

Note that the total year-to-date traffic is contracting year-over-year.

Steven Hansen

Source: AAR

Tags: aar, american association of railroads, car counts, cumulative, loadings, rail, railroads, steven hansen, weekly



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1 comment

  1. rayban aviators says :
    On 05/25/12 @ 06:03
    *****

    Thank you for supplying so many detail information about the coal. All we know the coal is the limited resource, we need to find a clean resouce to instead of it to protect our environment.