$$ Rail Traffic Still Surging to Highest Levels of The Year

Not sure what people convinced of a double dip are looking at but the #1 economic predictor in real time is rail traffic….and it is surging….2 of the last 4 weeks (ending 8/14) have been the strongest weeks of 2010. That means a ton of stuff is being moved/bought/sold etc…

We talked about this at the end of July and said that the slowdown we saw in late June early July was temporary and that trend at that time were turning up. Since that time traffic has surged 20k-30k care per week.

A picture is worth a million words……every category had made a hard bounce off the June/early July lull….

Now, the doubters will say “yea but rail traffic always starts to rally into the end of the year as retailers bulk up inventory for the holidays”. True, but it also tends to fall into early/mid summer. The same people saying this now were not admitting the seasonal summer slowdown when they were claiming rail traffic that was then slowing was a sign of a slowing economy and a heightened risk of a double dip. You can’t have it both ways.

The good news now is that total traffic and intermodal, aside from surging into the end of the year are also at yearly highs levels and appear to be going even higher if we are to believe comments from rail execs.

If we drill down even further, we see Canadian and Mexican traffic essentially unchanged meaning the bulk of the N. American improvement has come solely from the US……