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Last month, Genesee & Wyoming Inc.’s (GWI) subsidiary railroads handled 82,190 carloads, up 12.3 percent compared with April 2010 volume.

Excluding 5,925 carloads from Australia’s FreightLink, which GWI acquired in December, same-railroad traffic in April rose 4.2 percent. The volume gain was driven by an 11.9 percent increase in pulp and paper carloads, primarily in the Southern Region, and 11.3 percent climb in coal and coke carloads, primarily in the Illinois Region. In addition, chemicals and plastics traffic rose 8.4 percent, farm and food products traffic increased 5 percent, and petroleum products traffic went up 3.8 percent.

Since GWI acquired FreightLink, the holding company has been reporting two new commodity groups: intermodal and metallic ores. Intermodal traffic previously was included in the “other” commodity group and metallic ores traffic previously was included in the coal/coke/ores, minerals/stone and metals commodity groups.

GWI owns 63 regionals and short lines in the United States, Canada, Australia, Netherlands and Belgium.

Meanwhile, RMI’s RailConnect Index of Short Line Traffic for 2011’s first 17 weeks shows that through April, 338 North American regionals and short lines boosted carloads 8.9 percent to 1.78 million units compared with volume from the same 2010 period. Motor vehicles and equipment traffic skyrocketed 42.2 percent to 25,496 units, intermodal traffic climbed 21.8percent to 132,227 units, stone/clay/aggregates traffic rose 13.8 percent to 185,540 units and chemicals traffic increased 11.6 percent to 297,386 units.