The Year Ahead

Railroad Weekly January 6, 2025

courtesy: Steel Wheels Photography

Inside This Issue

· The Year Ahead: Will Railroads Thrive in 2025?

· Achieving Growth: Did Railroads Move Less or More in 2024?

· A New Day at the FRA: Safety Regulator Getting a new Administrator

· Still Unresolved: East Coast Port Strike Once Again Imminent

· Rio Grande Rapid: CPKC Completes New Cross-Border Bridge Span

· Prairie Very Merry: Canada’s Grain Movements Up Sharply

· Coming Soon: Q4 Railroad Earnings Season

· Looking Back: A History of the B&O Railroad

Publisher’s Note: Happy New Year to everyone in railroad land! I’m looking forward to another exciting year in 2025. A special thanks to Railroad Weekly sponsors Greenbrier and Koppers, and to all Railroad Weekly subscribers. All the best!

Track Talk

“Completion of this internationally important project more than doubles our capacity to move freight through the border at the largest international trade port of entry in North America. This is an important milestone that keeps Laredo-Nuevo Laredo at the center of North American trade, allowing the secure and efficient movement of more imports and exports across the U.S.-Mexico border.”

- CPKC CEO Keith Creel, celebrating a new international railway bridge span over the Rio Grande

The Year Ahead

· Welcome to 2025. The new year will surely bring its share of railroad drama. But will it bring growth? In 2024, North America’s railroads did manage to increase their traffic volumes—modestly. They did so despite a sharp decline in coal business, which at this point is more an accepted reality than a source of frustration. As discussed in the year-end review issue of Railroad Weekly last month, 2024 had its share of the forgettable and regrettable: labor unrest, disruptive weather, manufacturing weakness, housing weakness, steel market weakness, and unwelcome regulatory developments. But again, traffic did grow, albeit from subdued levels in 2023. Make no mistake: 2024 volumes were still below 2022 levels (as the chart below shows), and far below the industry’s 2018 peak.

· It’s one thing for traffic to grow. But what about revenues? Answering that requires caution, because revenues can decline if fuel prices decline, as they indeed declined last year. But those two things largely cancel each other out. We’ll know more about underlying revenue growth for 2024 when railroads report their fourth quarter