We don’t know much about art, but apparently famous painters go through different periods. Picasso had three: Blue Period from 1901-1904, Rose Period from 1904-1906, and Cubism from 1907-1917. Transposing…

In terms of monitoring Class I network health, the first two numbers we look at every week are the daily number of trains failing to depart on time due to…

Disruption at the Surface Transportation Board: One of the attributes of the freight transportation sector we’ve always liked has been its low politicization. People in and around the industry care…

We recently noted we’re already getting tired of writing about Union Pacific+Norfolk Southern; so, invariably, here’s a piece on UP+NS … How Powerful is Single-line Service? The ultimate success of…

Cutting to the chase on the 2027 STB merger decision: On July 30, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern submitted to the Surface Transportation Board their prefiling notification, which is basically…

Don’t make me take you to the watershed: During Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern’s July 29 presentation announcing the proposed combination, the piece we found most interesting (beyond the audacity…

Question: Where’s the belief in growth? Our State of the Rails chart (bottom) is starting to look good, and we show a truncated version. We now have half the industry,…

This is obviously the topic of the day, with lots of different aspects to it. Given this is an operations and service report, here’s the past 75 years of industry…

Given the Fourth of July effect in the most recent weekly data, we’ll give Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) a break from our weekly critique as it continues to try…

Railroad recoveries are almost always uneven (CSX the recent exception), and we’re seeing that with a mixed bag of data this week regarding CPKC’s efforts to rebound from the operational…

Some better data this week suggests that Canadian Pacific Kansas City’s southern U.S. operating problems related to its May 3 IT systems cutover might be starting to correct, which is…

Operating data for the week of May 26 highlighted the first of the four big public holidays that typically accelerate the U.S. Class I networks, due to the temporary reduction…

We’ve now seen three weeks of suppressed intermodal volumes at Union Pacific and BNSF due to the China air pocket effect, which is a lagging consequence of the 145% U.S.…

In the two weeks through May 17, the “China air pocket” in imports hitting the West Coast has become very visible. The trade war rhetoric between the U.S. and China…

More good progress from CSX, as it continues to rebound from the early April trough in operational efficiency. Operating car inventory has now fallen in four consecutive weeks, from its…

Following the Feb. 1 closure of the Howard Street tunnel in Baltimore and CSX’s subsequent collapse in operational efficiency through early April as it struggled with the associated reroutes, we’re…

The past couple of weeks you may have noticed that BNSF and Union Pacific have been running an increasingly tight ship as they shake off the last vestiges of winter…

As the flooding effects in Tennessee and Kentucky dissipated, CSX was able to get the network moving in the right direction in the week ending April 18. Average train speed,…

The Long Tail of Car Inventory Normalization: Last week we highlighted CSX’s battle to overcome significant flooding in Tennessee and Kentucky, due to storms from April 2-6. Last week’s data…

CN Rebounding Quickly from Winter Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve discussed CN’s network fluidity “mini-crash” that occurred in the week ending Feb. 21, due primarily to the compounding…