Tariffic Upheaval

Railroad Weekly April 14, 2025

courtesy: Steel Wheels Photography

Inside This Issue

· Tariffic Upheaval: Another Week of Dizzying Tariff Drama

· Intermodal Model Menace? Will Tariff War Destroy Container Shipping?

· Workforce Divorce? Will RRs Once Again Cut Staffing?

· Oregon Rail: STB Approves UP Shortline Handoff

· Steel Breaker: Steel Tariffs Make it Pricier to Build Railcars

· Was Pan Am a Grand Slam? A Former CSX Exec Reflects on a Takeover

· Land Slam: How Data Centers Threaten RR Industrial Development

· This Week: CSX Kicks off Q1 RR Earnings Season

Read American Places, a book with deep insights into the most important trends and developments throughout the U.S. economy -Jay Shabat, Publisher, Railroad Weekly

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Track Talk

“We just don’t know what the rules of the game are going to be.”

-Todd Tranausky, Logistics Procurement Manager, American Styrene

The Latest

· This is no way to run a railroad. Except it’s not a railroad. It’s the largest economy on Planet Earth. In the latest twist of America’s tariff drama, President Trump abruptly suspended the “reciprocal” tariffs he announced just a week earlier—for three months. The decision followed further tumult in the stock market and—more worryingly—signs of trouble in the bond market. As you’ll see on the Market Indicator chart below, yields on longer-term Treasury debt spiked by almost half a point, another way of saying that more people were selling Treasuries than buying them. That’s not a bad thing if they’re using the money to buy stocks or invest in new projects. In this case, money flowed out of Treasuries into cash or out of the country, possibly reflecting lost confidence in the safe-haven status of the U.S. government as a creditor (Alexander Hamilton first established that confidence in the 1790s). Sure enough, the value of the U.S. dollar declined versus most major currencies last week, the opposite of what usually happens when the global economy gets the yips. Back in