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News Wire: Grain, coal leading upward trend in U.S. rail shipping

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Posted by Brian Schmidt on Thursday, May 11, 2017 9:02 AM

WASHINGTON — U.S. railroads continue to show overall year-to-year traffic growth led again last week by grain and coal loads, the Association of American Railroads reports. For the week ending May 6, railroads tallied 515,305 carload and inter...

http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2017/05/11-aar-traffic-numbers

Brian Schmidt, Editor, Classic Trains magazine

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Posted by oltmannd on Thursday, May 11, 2017 5:08 PM

I really hate these two data point comparisons.  It's hard to tell if the changes are signal or noise.

-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/

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Posted by Norm48327 on Saturday, May 13, 2017 10:57 AM

Signal to noise ratio:

IMO Brian's posts are more of the latter. Most of us are intelligent enough to see what's going on.

Norm


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Posted by ns145 on Monday, May 22, 2017 3:29 PM

oltmannd

I really hate these two data point comparisons.  It's hard to tell if the changes are signal or noise.

 

 

I agree.  I have found the AAR's Freight Rail Traffic Data website to be much more informative:  https://www.aar.org/data-center/rail-traffic-data

The interactive graphs (weekly and monthly) allow you to isolate commodity groups and compare absolute carload stats  between 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.  The annual graph shows revenue tonnage for 2006-2015.  

Weekly coal carloads are up in 2017 vs. 2016, but are still significantly below the levels seen in 2014 and the first 8 months of 2015. 

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