This short article provides a brief overview of Rail carload rates (SA). Contact crt@ftrintel.com with additional questions.
The rail rate outlook provided in the Shippers Update service looks at historical and forecast rate increases in the rail carload space on a revenue-per-ton-mile basis. This means that it is impacted by mix shifts, especially as heavy, highly rated traffic, like coal, moves in smaller amounts by rail.
It is based on Surface Transportation Board data as well as hand-made expert adjustments to account for the carriers’ inflation-plus pricing strategies that are not always reflected perfectly in the FreightCast model's initial outputs. It does not include any fuel surcharge assumption, so shippers would need to add to the output to account for their respective fuel surcharge mechanism. Fuel surcharges are excluded from the calculation because of the many different fuel surcharge methodologies in place across different commodities and shipment types.