Some really interesting data today. After seeing a gradual slide post Japan disaster, auto shipments jumped 36% for the week to 18.4k carloads. This marks the largest increase this year. Some of this may be a post 4th of July bump (I am sure some of it is) and some may be car supplied increases as plants come back online. Fortunately we will have out answer rather quick. We need to see the shipments cross the 23k-24k level for this to be increased production (and hence demand since auto sales follow shipments very closely). The other categories cam in roughly the same as the prior week with only coal showing its second significant increase (prob due to increased cooling needs).
For the carriers ($CSX, $NSC, $BNI, $KSU, $UNP) all showed gains with $CSX showing the largest.
total for the week was 673k cars up from 660k in week 28:
