(The following story by John D. Boyd appeared on The Journal of Commerce website on January 4, 2010.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Buffeted by a major winter storm that socked much of the Appalachian coal mining region in the week of Christmas, major U.S. railroads loaded fewer railcars with the fuel than any time in the past year.
Large carriers that report their traffic to the Association of American Railroads – which counts volume from the Class I carriers as well as several large regional lines – originated just 89,460 loads of coal in the week ending Dec. 26.
That was down from 124,114 carloads of coal those same railroads picked up one week earlier, and was the only week in 2009 in which loadings of coal – the largest rail cargo — fell below 100,000 units. The previous weekly low of 2009 was 113,147 carloads as of May 30, or nearly 24,000 units more than the Dec. 26 total.
Coal traffic has already suffered from a lack of commercial demand for electricity, as many types of factories are still either shut down or operating at reduced capacity due to the recession. Electrical power plants also built up large enough stockpiles ahead of winter that they needed less volume this year to keep up with heating demands.
But the huge snowstorm that struck the eastern United States on Dec. 18 and 19 left many areas digging out from record snowfalls over the next few days. While train crews cleared tracks, commercial activity across the region was sharply reduced as states and cities struggled to clear their roads so workers and holiday shoppers could travel normally.
That left coal loadings in the latest week down 19.1 percent or 21,137 carloads from the Christmas week of 2008, equal to more than 200 train loads. That was also the sharpest year-over-year decline for any 2009 week since May 6, when coal loadings were 19.9 percent below the year-earlier level.
In all, major U.S. carriers picked up 197,754 carloads in the Dec. 26 week, down 1.1 percent from a year earlier and compared with 271,819 in the week ending Dec. 19.
But while their new intermodal loadings of 141,699 containers and trailers were down from 209,759 a week earlier, that intermodal volume was up 14.2 percent from the same week in 2008.