Uncle Larry

Warnings from the Shops and Shippers

Year to date, CSX auto and truck shipments are down 19% to 281,000 car loads Horrors!. But the total carloads is 3,849,000. Does not look like the auto industry is a significant portion of the traffic, even if CSX can carge more per carload than most other freight. Do the shipments of components to the assembly plants constitute a large volume? Maybe, but a large percentage of these shipments are shorthaul and go by truck.

What about steel manufacture to make the components? CNI will be hit much harder because they own the old Duluth, Missage and Iron Range and the Bessemer and Lake Erie railroads that are about dedicated to taconite ore shipments. I show 48,000 carloads of mettalic ore for CSX YTD - that is NOT statistically significant. Coal shipments for steel manufacture? These are short hauls again - from Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia to steel mills in West Virginia and Ohio.

I am more interested in the other part of the 1,403,000 carloads of coal, most of which is going to domestic power plants, paper mills as well as export - and most of this is long haul. I watch those CSX coal drags go past that are going from Kentucky to Florida and I smile with contentment.

With a new coal fired in southwest Georgia going up soon, prospects look even better.