Traffic in 2022: Mostly a feel-good story among the short-line crowd
1/11/2023
By Jeff Stagl, Managing Editor
Most of the seven Class Is in the United States and Canada didn’t end 2022 with favorable traffic outcomes. As a result, their collective carloads last year dipped a couple of percentage points compared with total 2021 traffic.
Only two of the large roads registered year-over-year gains in 2022: Union Pacific Railroad, at 4.5% (with 4,567,168 carloads), and CN, at 3.9% (with 3,219,780 carloads), according to Association of American Railroads data. Canadian Pacific’s traffic tumbled 4.1% to 1,617,856 units and BNSF Railway Co.’s traffic slipped 2.2% to 4,484,165 units.
But many regionals and short lines in the United States and Canada can claim better traffic fortunes last year. Collectively, 479 small railroads in those nations bettered the Class Is’ performance by registering 6,937,122 carloads in 2022, down only 0.3% year over year, according to the RailConnect Index of Short Line Traffic for the 52-week period ending Dec. 31.
The short lines posted their highest gains in the following four carload categories: stone, clay and aggregates, up 5.3% to 734,000 units; motor vehicles and equipment, up 4% to 159,097 units; coal, up 3.3% to 439,782 units; and petroleum and coke, up 2.1% to 233,496 units. They also registered year-over-year increases of less than 1% in the grain, farm and food products excluding grain, waste/scrap materials and intermodal sectors, the index shows.
In 2022, 479 reporting regionals and short lines handled nearly 7 million carloads, down 0.3% compared with 2021 volume, the RailConnect Index of Short Line Traffic shows. GE Transportation, a Wabtec company The decliners among 14 traffic categories were lumber and forest products at 4.7% (to 303,906 units), metals and products at 4.5% (to 454,948 units), paper products at 2.7% (to 396,990 units), chemicals at 2.6% (to 1,233,165 units) and ores at 1.6% (to 155,116 units). The number of “all other” carloads — a small catch-everything-else traffic category — declined 11.2% to 93,682 units.
To learn how individual regionals, short lines and short-line holding companies fared with traffic in 2022, RailPrime reached out to more than 20 of them. Following are emailed comments from seven responders.
OmniTRAX Inc.’s 23 short lines together logged a modest year-over-year increase. Strength in energy and industrial products demand led the way, officials at the short-line holding company said.
“We also benefited from a number of new customer start-ups,” they added.
Sierra Northern Railway benefitted in a big way last year from some growth generated by new business and a banner year among a number of existing customers. The 100-mile northern California short line logged a nearly 50% traffic gain in 2022 compared with 2021’s total.
“I think a lot of the existing customer growth was due to high diesel prices and the lack of available trucks and drivers, resulting in more freight moving by rail,” said Sierra Northern Railway President and CEO Kennan Beard.
The short line now has boosted traffic by about 50% in back-to-back years, and the railroad’s 2023 traffic projection anticipates a threepeat.
Sierra Northern’s new Ventura line should help generate more traffic this year, Beard said. The short line’s Ventura Division retains a 35-year lease with the Ventura County Transportation Commission to operate freight and tourist trains on the 32-mile Santa Paula Branch Line from Ventura to near Piru.
“As I tell everyone that asks, it is a good time to be in the railroad business!” Beard exclaimed.
The good times certainly continued for Farmrail System Inc. last year. Through November, the company had boosted traffic by 13.2% versus 2021, said Farmrail Chairman George Betke. Strong grain business was the primary driver.
“[We] had a decent December, so double digits should be assured for the year,” Betke said, referring to Farmrail’s final year-over-year carload percentage gain in 2022.
The company operates Farmrail Corp. and Grainbelt Corp., which collectively operate more than 200 miles of track in Oklahoma. Farmrail System now has distanced itself from a business trough that followed the 2020 collapse of oilfield activity in Oklahoma, said Betke.
Count the Reading, Blue Mountain & Northern Railroad Co. (RBMN) — which operates about 400 miles of track from Reading to Mehoopany, Pennsylvania — among the double-digit percentage gainers. The short line’s 2022 revenue freight carloads climbed 15.4% to a new record, with overall carload growth exceeding 4,000 units, said RBMN President Wayne Michel.
“Increases were driven by the impacts of the ‘Russian invasion’ on American anthracite coal shipments and by natural gas demand requiring more frac sand,” he said.
Traffic was sluggish for Farmrail in 2020 after oilfield activity slowed in Oklahoma, but strong grain demand helped the company boost carloads in 2022 by a double-digit percentage. Farmrail System Inc. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused havoc in the international anthracite market as well as wild swings in the energy market. As a result, demand rose for natural gas produced in the Marcellus Shale, making RBMN’s opening of its new Tunkhannock frac sand terminal last year very timely, said Michel.
“Our passenger excursion business also was up over 10%, exceeding 250,000 riders for first time ever,” he said.
The year-over-year traffic increase was on a much smaller scale for the Buckingham Branch Railroad (BBR) in 2022, at 1.6%. Virginia’s largest short line, BBR operates 280 miles of track in four divisions.
No particular commodity group had a big impact on carloads last year as traffic increased for some existing customers and decreased for others, said BBR President Steve Powell.
“We also had some new transload customers and some new ‘brick and mortar’ customers,” he said. “We always need to be adding new traffic to the top of the bucket, because we’re always having some existing traffic leak out.”
The Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis (TRRA) notched a small traffic bump, too.
“Our overall traffic increased less than 1% in broad terms,” said TRRA President Brent Wood.
The association owns and operates the Merchants Bridge, MacArthur Bridge, a rail switching facility in Madison, Illinois, and several key rail routes in St. Louis and Illinois’ Madison and St. Clair counties.
But 2022 wasn’t quite as kind to the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad Co. (IHBRR), which operates 54 miles of mainline track and 266 miles of additional yard and siding track in the greater Chicago area. The short line’s traffic dipped slightly less than 1%.
“Auto traffic and unplanned steel and coke shutdowns caused the slight decrease,” said IHBRR General Manager John Wright.
