Railroad shipping: AAR says weekly loadings down year-over-year

Staff -- Logistics Management, 3/28/2008

WASHINGTON—The American Association of Railroads (AAR) said yesterday that freight traffic volumes on United States railroads for the week ending March 22 were down compared to last year.

Weekly carload freight, which does not include intermodal data, came in at 323,536 cars, down 3.3 percent from the same timeframe last year. And carload freight loadings were down 1.6 percent in the West and 5.4 percent in the East.

After being down 15.1 percent for the first week of the month and 1.4 percent last week, intermodal loadings were down 5.2 percent compared to the same week last year. The AAR said that intermodal trailers or containers came in at 210,914. Container volume was down 4.0 percent, and trailer volume was down 9.2 percent.

Weekly railroad volume was estimated at 33.5 billion ton-miles by the AAR, which is down 2.3 percent from the 12th week of 2007.

Of the 19 commodity groups tracked by the AAR, five were up year over year, with metallic ores spiking 70.2 percent, and grain up 10.7 percent. On the other end were lumber & wood products off 20.6 percent and motor vehicles and equipment loadings down 23.3 percent.

Cumulative volume for the first 12 weeks of the year were 3,840,033 carloads, which was slightly ahead of the first 12 weeks of 2007 by 0.8 percent. Trailers or containers—at 2,596,368—were down 4.1 percent, and total volume was an estimated 397.1 billion ton-miles, which was up 1.9 percent year over year.