Railway carloadings

The traditional winter slowdown in business for Canada's railways between December and January is becoming almost a thing of the past.

Loadings declined in January this year compared with December, but only slightly. In total, railways loaded 23.3 million metric tonnes of freight in January, down only 1.3% from the previous month. It was the smallest decline from December to January in the last three years.

Business has been picking up for railways in January. In fact, on a year-over-year basis, tonnage increased at its fastest pace in three years this January.

Loadings this year were 6.1% higher than they were in January 2005, well above the year-over-year pace measured during the previous two years.

Loadings of non-intermodal goods reached 21.1 million tonnes in January, down 1.3% from the revised 21.4 million tonnes in December 2005. About 266,000 railcars were needed to load all of January's non-intermodal freight.

On a commodity basis, potash loadings fell by about a third from December. Loadings of wood from all related commodity groupings showed strong gains. All metallic ores and concentrates showed some decline while their derivatives, the metallic products groupings, all progressed.

Intermodal loadings, that is containers and trailers hauled on flat cars, amounted to 2.2 million tonnes, virtually unchanged from December.

Traffic received from Canadian connections dropped by 12.1% from December. Part of this drop was due to three short line carriers having been bought by a larger carrier. This reduced the total number of carriers in Canada and the total volume of goods exchanged between Canadian carriers.

Freight coming from the United States, either destined for or passing through Canada, reached 2.4 million tonnes, up 4.4% from December.

Traffic from the United States is showing a profile similar to non-intermodal loadings, where January figures have been continuously increasing since 2003.

Note: Data on railway carloadings have undergone some revisions since the last release.

Available on CANSIM: table 404-0002.

Definitions, data sources and methods: survey number 2732.

The January 2006 issue of Monthly Railway Carloadings, Vol. 83, no. 1 (52-001-XIE, $9 / $83) is now available.

For more information, or to enquire about the concepts, methods or data quality of this release, contact the Dissemination Unit (1-866-500-8400; fax: 1-613-951-0009; TransportationStatistics@statcan.gc.ca), Transportation Division.