Monday, January 12, 2015

Freight Mix

While looking for maps, I came across the following pie chart in a UP fact sheet.

UP Fact Sheet
The fact sheet has a paragraph for each category giving examples for each. It is worth noting that crude oil and soda ash are classified as chemicals. It would be interesting to find the mix for the other Class I carriers. Given that Coal, Intermodal, and Automotive are unit trains with purpose-built freight cars, they are easy to identify from track side. Agricultural would be 3-bay covered hoppers, refers, tank cars (corn syrup, vegetable oils), and box cars (beer). Chemicals would be 4-bay covered hoppers (plastic pellets), tank cars (ethenol, crude-oil, and all sorts of horrible sounding stuff), and other covered hoppers. Industrial would be lumber cars, various covered hoppers, gondolas including coil cars, flat cars, and box cars (household appliances). So I would guess the BNSF mix is comparable. What little I have seen of CSX trains (Evansville, IN) has very few unit trains and thus more merchandize freights. So their mix might be rather different.



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