Eastern Railroad Discussion > Norfolk Southern “Cars On Line” Drops 10K Plus

Since the first of the year NS has managed to reduce the number of cars on line as reported to the STB by some 10,000 plus cars. For week ending 3/8/2019 a reduction of 14,935 cars was reported vs the same week in 2018.Now we know where the locomotives placed out of service are stored for the most part. So where are 10,000 cars??Have to think the same place they have always been. Just a change in each cars reported status from active to an in-active status perhaps?

According to the AAR for week ending March 9, 2019 carloads were down 7% with intermodal containers and trailers down 2.6% compared to 2018. Total combined traffic for the first 10 weeks of 2019 is down 0.7%.

The graph below indicates the last 8 weeks reported cars on line for NS & CSX .

Phil Maton
Villa Rica, GA

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NS has shed a lot of old stored NS equipment over the past several months which may attribute it to the decline, but I would have the think more of it that is a new practice that has increased shipper costs but benifited NS's numbers and given a new source of revenue to shortlines.  Due to the demurrage amount being changed, as well as the switch fee to remove a car from constructive placement at in a rail yard to actual placement in a customer track,  higher volume yet slower moving rail users (think plastics and petro chem) have found it is less expensive to send their product (plastic pellets, chemical, etc) in bulk to a shortline in the general area of their end users and store cars there, then rebill those cars off the shortline as new shipments to end users on a close to JIT type schedule.  On other side of coin, empties headed back a shipper are being diverted to shortline and held, then moved as revenue empty to plant as needed vs paying demurrage to hold in RR yard out side plant.  One of our lines has recently picked up 3 accounts like this - 1 loaded,2 empty car - that has taken around 100 cars off NS at any given time in the SW Ohio area,  We're just a little guy, and I'm sure we are not the only ones doing this - enough operations like this spread across the system could easilay account for a couple thousand cars at least.  

scraphauler, thanks for the interesting reply to this post!  Good info for sure that explains some of the reduction. 

Phil Maton
Villa Rica, GA

Seems like most railroads are saying less cars on line.  Really!    With so few major railroads cars that go off one have to go to another one don't they.  Sounds like creative accounting.

tomstp Wrote:
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> Seems like most railroads are saying less cars on
> line.  Really!    

Here are the Cars On Line numbers for the 5 US Class 1's for the past 8 weeks. Winter weather and flooding in the mid-west is showing the effects on the two western roads on several of the metrics.

Phil Maton
Villa Rica, GA

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As my dad was fond of saying, "figures don't lie, but liars figure".