U.S. freight carload volume for the week ending April 28, 2012 fell 4.1% measured against the comparable week a year ago, continuing an ongoing trend for the year, the Association of American Railroads said Thursday. U.S. intermodal volume, however, continued its own yearly trend during the week, up 5.5% compared with the same week in 2011.
Greenwich, Conn.-based Genesee & Wyoming, Inc. said Friday its March 2012 traffic volume fell 13.6% compared with the same month a year ago. As well, GWI’s first-quarter traffic volume declined, though less dramatically, by 9.2% measured against the comparable quarter in 2011.
U.S. freight carload traffic for the week ending March 24, 2012 fell significantly, down 7.2%, measured against the comparable week in 2011, the Association of American Railroads (AAR) said Thursday, continuing a decline that now has run for some time.
Union Pacific told JPMorgan’s Aviation, Transportation and Defense conference Tuesday that while most shipping volumes are up this year, it expects a 7% drop in first-quarter coal volume due to the mild winter.
Norfolk Southern is increasingly an intermodal railroad. As of Feb. 18, nearly half of total revenue units year-to-date — 412,077 out of 911,473 or 48.6% — were intermodal boxes (an intermodal container or trailer is one AAR revenue unit as is one conventional carload). A year ago intermodal was 43.7% of the total. Where’s it coming from?
The Surface Transportation Board issued a decision Tuesday denying a petition of the Western Coal Traffic League (WCTL) asking the Board to institute mediation on a new coal dust tariff issued by BNSF Railway. Instead, the decision is instituting a new proceeding “to consider the reasonableness of the new tariff’s safe harbor provision.”
Montana House Bill 422, advanced by those seeking to weigh down short line Tongue River Railroad’s efforts to extend its right-of-way to coal deposits, has stalled. The bill, backed by some state landowners and by environmentalists, seeks to make eminent domain procedures more difficult.
In a ruling March 2, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago affirmed an earlier decision by a federal court judge in Milwaukee, rejecting a claim by We Energies that Union Pacific overcharged it $23 million for coal deliveries to its Wisconsin power plants. Milwaukee-based We Energies is UP’s largest customer in the Badger State.
The MidAmerica Corridor, a new trackage rights agreement between CN and Norfolk Southern, is designed to establish shorter, faster routes for merchandise and coal traffic moving between the Midwest and Southeast.