25 years of rail. Six Sigma Black Belt. Turning shortlines into strategic assets. Founder, Railroad Sensei. The iron doesn’t lie.
Joined January 2026
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Q3 intermodal numbers are in and the Class Is had a good summer. UP intermodal revenue up 27% on 11% more volume. CSX up 20% on 7%. CPKC up 22% on 9%. All three point to the same thing: a tighter truck market sending freight back to the rail.
Revenue growing faster than volume means rate and mix came along too. That holds only as long as the service does.
Domestic intermodal customers came over because trucks got hard to find. They stay if the train makes its cut, the ramp turns boxes on time and the chassis is there when the dray shows up. If the truck market loosens next year, those are the numbers they will check before they sign again.
theloadstar.com/upswing-in-d…
#Intermodal #FreightRail
Somebody in sales looks at a map, sees a line running right past a new shipper's site, and figures there's room for them.
Track on the ground is not capacity.
Capacity is crews who are rested and qualified on that territory. It's a yard that can actually hold and build the train. It's sidings long enough for what you're running today, not what ran in 1985. It's time on the main to get in and out, and a local that can work you without blowing up every other customer on the job.
You can have miles of good rail and still have no room, because the bottleneck is people, time and the plan, not steel.
Before you start promising cars to a new shipper, you better know whether your operation can handle them. Because once that customer starts depending on you, having track isn't going to be enough.
#FreightRail #Railroading
Short line grants are some of the best money in freight rail right now. But a grant is a capital event, not a service plan. Shippers, ask your short line one thing: what changes at my dock when the work is done?
Joining Trucker Talk Radio today at 1:00 PM CT to talk freight from the rail side. Trucks and trains aren't rivals. They're the same shipment at different points in the move. Tune in, and find me on LinkedIn as RailRoadSensei.
AAR week ending Oct 10: total traffic +7.2%, intermodal +10.4%, carloads +3.4%, 8 of 10 groups up. Volume is coming back. The real test is whether service holds when it does. Shippers burned by past meltdowns remember, and they watch dwell before they move freight.
10 empty cars on the ground near 75th St in Chicago. No injuries, no hazmat, no crossings blocked. Cause still under investigation. Empties are light and react hard to in-train forces and track conditions. In a terminal this busy, the small stuff shows up first.
Intermodal up 10.4% last week, carloads up 3.4%. Year to date it's 4.4% intermodal, 2.7% carloads. The boxes are carrying the growth. A carload customer still judges us on one thing: did the car show up when the plant needed it.
Ozinga opened a cement mill in East Chicago on the Indiana Harbor Belt. CHS is building a soybean plant in Evansville on UP. Different products, same opportunity. Rail service starts at the industry track.
Congratulations to the Port of Columbia on securing $1 million for its rail connection to Union Pacific. That's a meaningful investment in rail access and the future opportunities it can bring to the region.
The STB's Oct. 8 decision found four Class I railroads revenue adequate for 2025: BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific. That's the financial measure. Now measure service at the switch. Shippers live with the operation, not the annual report. The yard doesn't lie.
Intermodal up 7.4%. Carloads up 2.4%. (AAR, week ending 10/3)
Boxes are moving. Carload is the harder test. Grain fell 1,160 cars. Chemicals dipped 49.
The industry track tells the rest. Reliable spot-and-pull service is where carload growth gets earned.
#FreightRail
The derail at Hardy Farms in Durant did what a derail is there to do. It kept an uncontrolled car off the active track.The car was being moved without a locomotive.Someone was on it. NTSB is investigating. Cause is not established.Industry-track protection fails at the hand brake
Public STB data now shows Class I manifest on-time and local spot-and-pull for the first time.
Manifest on-time means the car arrived no later than 24 hours after the original ETA. Spot-and-pull is the share of scheduled industry moves made inside the planned window. Unit trains and intermodal are not in either number.
A railroad can look fluid on the network and still miss the switch the customer was sold. The useful question is not which carrier wins the chart. It is whether a 24-hour tolerance matches the service on the contract.
Business mix, geography, and how the railroad’s system calculates the metric make cross-carrier rankings sloppy. Rick Paterson flagged that himself.
#FreightRail #RailService #STB #ClassI #Shortline #Shippers #RailroadOperations
Safety week is the easy part.
The operating test is whether crossing discipline holds when local switching and intermodal volume pick up—especially on shortlines, where the crossing is part of the work, not a mainline fly-through.
Expect a train. Only cross at designated crossings. Stay off the tracks.
#SeeTracksThinkTrain #RedOutForRailSafety #RailSafety #Shortline