Weekly U.S. rail traffic data just dropped, and it&#x27;s confirming significant strength in the industrial segment of the economy. Total traffic is up an amazing 7.2%, with carloads rising 3.2% year-to-date, despite declines in coal and flat forest products. This is a critical indicator of future freight demand, including trucking, as manufacturers ramp up production. Follow the FreightWaves Today Podcast Other FreightWaves Shows Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Industrial Segment 'Comes Alive': What Rail Data Predicts

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**Podcast:** FreightCasts

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Weil es bedeutet, dass wir 24 Stunden haben. Die Weekly American Association of Railroad. Volume data they put out every single week. One of the reasons I think it's really important is it tells us about the strength of demand that's outside of the trucking nuances. So, wenn wir das über das, we could see trucking volumes, we could see tender rejections, we could get a sense for how the trucking market's doing

and tells us a lot about the economy to go to the upstream economy. But we don't get a ton of insights on the industrial segment in terms of strength without looking at railroads, because that is the primary mode of traffic for the U.S. industrial segment is through the railroads. Now, I want to take intermodal off the table because really intermodal is a fungible mode of traffic between trucking and intermodal.

And some of the intermodal data is being impacted by trucking capacity, by being driver availability. It's a fungible commodity between rail and truck. And therefore, shippers will shift their volumes around based on conditions at the trucking market to take advantage of lower pricing and capacity. And I believe we're seeing that in the intermodal data. But I want to get to the bulk data because I think it's probably the most interesting part of the data that we get for the American Association of Railroads.

No one has to tell me and certainly our viewers that trucking is absolutely on fire. I think the big question is how much of that is demand driven. And to look at the economy, we need to know how the industrials are, because we really went through a couple of years where the industrial segment wasn't doing great. And we're starting to see it come back alive. And the American Association of Rail Data, their weekly report, confirms this.

It also tells us that things are getting better and stronger, not weaker, despite all the noise that you may hear out in the news and sort of broader economic stuff, concerns about what's happening. We are seeing industrials come back. It's a really strong report. It continues to firm. Things are getting stronger as we move into the year, which I think tells us a lot about what to expect in the second half.

It relates to overall freight demand, including trucking, because the nice thing about the rail data is it tells us what's likely to happen a couple of months out. Because if you're bringing in source material into your manufacturing plants, you're doing that months in advance of when production is. And so when we look at t...

Industrial Segment 'Comes Alive': What Rail Data Predicts

Transcript

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Industrial Segment 'Comes Alive': What Rail Data Predicts

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.