Total N. American rail traffic did what we expected last week, nothing much to talk about. The data came in at 698k cars, down from 701k the previous week. Given the Labor Day holiday, this is of no surprise or concern.
Going forward, we would expect the data to stagnate near this level with the dramatic dips around Turkey Day and Christmas. Doing so is not a negative for Q4 economic performance, it is just the seasonality of the data. What we don’t want to see is a consistent slide (accepting there will be weekly variances now due to weather). Should we see the date grind higher, that is VERY good news.
