Heard On The Street |
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Spot covered hopper barge freight for the month of September is up about 20% over July / August values as rates heat up in anticipation of a pretty busy Fall export grain harvest.
No doubt scrap metal prices will rise in Sept.
Flow into the yards is off by a large percentage due to the extreme heat and heavy rains this summer and I don't think the mills got anywhere near the scrap they had hoped to buy in August.
I believe that prices will remain firm through the balance of the year.
Some mills have suggested pricing of scrap should not really increase in September and may decide not to buy or to buy little. (We'll see.) |
Somewhere In Time |
What is the Association of American Railroads and when did it form?
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was incorporated in 1827 and is generally considered the beginning of freight railroads in North America. More than a century later (1934) five different railroad associations joined together to form the Association of American Railroads.
- American Railway Association,
- Association of Railway Executives
- Bureau of Railroad Economics
- Railway Accounting Officers Association
- Railway Treasury Officers Association.
There were 132 Class I railroads active at that time. The goal was to properly police their own industry, set standards by which all would abide, improve safety and awareness, and to champion their causes before the public and various government agencies. Over the past 74 years numerous factors brought consolidation of the rail industry into the 7 Class I railroads we have today—BNSF (no longer officially its longer name, Burlington Northern & Santa Fe), Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, CSXT, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific.
The AAR continues to focus on safety and service issues including the publication and agreement of all industry rules for car hire, car service, interchange, safety and repairs. It remainsithe primary voice for the railroad industry before government agencies and Congress (along with its counterpart the American Short Line & Regional Railroad Association). Its subsidiary, Railinc, manages all technology including UMLER (database of all rail equipment with all characteristics of every railcar in North America) and acts as a clearing house of data for all interchange, car movement, and car repair activity for all railroads in North America. |
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Latest News |
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Welcome to the August 2010 issue of the Monthly Newsletter from WT&L Corp and Iron Horse Logistics Services. Included in this issue is a more extensive Market Update than normal. I have specifically provided some rail data and a resource to explore this more fully. You may find this a very helpful tool.
At WT&L and Iron Horse we continue to develop new resources to place into your hands through our web sites. Currently we see and hear that the most helpful ones are:
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This Newsletter- I probably get more comments on this than any other single item when I travel. The Newsletter gets posted to the web sites monthly, but you can also sign up for an email alert for this and for other news items from WT&L and Iron Horse. Simply go to www.wtandl.com and fill in the information on the Home Page, or go to the Resource Center at www.makelogisticseasy.com to sign up. -
Rail Carrier Fuel Surcharges- Iron Horse has been providing a matrix of the major carriers fuel surcharges for free for the past several years. The list for the current and prior month remain available at no charge but a registration is now requested to gain access. Shippers all over North America refer to this resource regularly to monitor fuel surcharges and to apply to their rates. Go to http://www.ihlogistics.com/fuel-surcharge-rate-software.aspx to sign up and gain access today. -
Railcar Inventory- WT&L continues to maintain a listing of some of the available groups of railcars available in an easy-to-read and sortable list. All car types can be found and details are available by simply clicking the Request button. Go to www.wtandl.com and follow the link on the Home Page.
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Market Update |
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Where have all the experts gone? Maybe they all moved to Washington DC where all the new jobs seem to have been created? There was a time when anyone with some experience in the metals industry (whether a shipper, broker, consumer, or transporter) had a solid opinion about the markets, business overall, and the economy. Today everyone questions whether there will be a re-recession (aka double-dip), if the economy really has gained any footing, what trend we can expect to see within the steel industry for the balance of 2010 and beyond, and what we can expect even next month for that matter.
There seem to be more questions than answers, and more so than at almost any time I can remember. Even in 2009 when almost everything was horrible we all knew it was bad and that it would get worse before getting better. We had clearer expectations than today.
There are some indicators that can help and many can be found reported in the news regularly. Housing starts, jobless counts, GDP, inventory levels, and other factors help provide some sense of where we could be headed. For the rail transportation industry one resource is Rail Time Indicators, a monthly publication by the Association of American Railroads (AAR). The current issue offers the following statistics:
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(U.S. Freight Rail Traffic) Not Seasonally Adjusted: Carloads in July 2010 ↑ 4.1% from July 2009, ↓ 14.6% from July 2008. Weekly average of 280,577 carloads in
July 2010 lowest since February 2010. Intermodal in July 2010 ↑ 17.3% from July 2009, ↓ 5.1% from July 2008. Weekly average of 220,988 intermodal trailers and containers in July 2010 highest since October 2008, up from an average of 220,267 in June 2010. Seasonally Adjusted: Carloads in July 2010 ↑ 3.2% from June 2010;
intermodal in July 2010 ↑ 2.4% from June 2010. -
(Canadian Freight Rail Traffic) Not Seasonally Adjusted: Carloads in July 2010 ↑ 19.0% from July 2009, ↓ 7.5% from July 2008. Intermodal in July 2010 ↑ 19.9% from
July 2009 and ↓ 3.5% from July 2008. Seasonally Adjusted: Carloads in July 2010 ↑ 2.7% from June 2010. Intermodal in July 2010 ↑ 0.2% from June 2010. -
(Rail Freight Cars In Storage) ↓ to 359,471 on August 1, 2010 (23.4% of the fleet) from 365,279 (23.7%) on July 1, 2010. Cars in storage have declined for 13 straight months, totaling more than 143,000 cars out since that time.
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Quick News Notes |
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Ingram, the largest carrier operating on the inland waterways, recently purchased an additional 92 barges.
"Orders for big-ticket manufactured goods rose 0.3 percent in July but only because of a 76 percent jump in sales of commercial aircraft, the Commerce Department said.
Excluding the volatile transportation category, durable-goods orders fell 3.8 percent. Business orders for capital goods plunged 8 percent, the sharpest decrease since January 2009. The numbers were worse than economists expected. Coupled with other recent data, the report provided new evidence that the economic recovery is losing steam. A report Tuesday estimated that sales of previously owned homes plunged 27 percent in July, the sharpest drop in decades "
In early August, "Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.) introduced the Freight Rail Infrastructure Capacity Expansion Act of 2010 (S. 3749), which aims to encourage private capital investments in freight rail and help expand rail capacity."
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to amend a section of 49 CFR. The changes intend to improve safety in construction of new rail equipment and to recognize the the impact technology and other standards now provide.
LAKE OSWEGO, Ore., Aug 25, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- The Greenbrier Companies (NYSE: GBX) announced today that it has received orders for over 1,000 new double-stack intermodal platforms, along with orders for over 700 new covered hopper cars. In addition, Greenbrier will re-engineer and modify approximately 1,100 existing double-stack platforms to 53' from smaller dimensions. The aggregate value of the new railcar orders and refurbishment work is approximately $130 million. (www.gbrx.com)
In 2009 through August 21 the domestic steel industry had produced about 36.5 million tons of raw steel. For the same period in 2010 the total was about 56.9 million tons, or an increase of over 56 percent! In YTD 2009 only about 46 percent of available production capacity was in use; YTD 2010 was up to just under 71 percent.
You have never seen a traffic jam like this. Reports this week advise that China has a 60-mile (yes, sixty miles) traffic jam due to construction that has drivers delayed for days, even weeks!
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Sincerely,
Dennis Wilmot
Iron Horse Logistics Services and WT&L Corp | | |