Weekly carloads from the Surface Transportation Board’s (STB) Rail Service Metrics. Each week, the seven Class I railroads submit originated and received carloads by 23 major commodity groups, such as grain, grain mill, primary forest products, chemicals, coal, containers, trailers, etc.

While the STB began collecting some service metrics from railroads (e.g., trains speeds, origin dwell, and terminal dwell) in October 2014, it did not start collecting carload data until March 2017 through a new rulemaking.

This view aggregates tonnages from the Public Use Carload Waybill Sample and generates shipment size categories from the number of carloads field.

Query from rail carloadings data set to show the most recent week of data. It also includes average weekly carloads based on the month to provide a sense of the seasonal expected level. Additionally, it includes a calculation of one standard deviation above and below that average to provide a sense of variation around the expected level.

The Surface Transportation Board's Carload Waybill Sample is perhaps the most comprehensive dataset available on railroad movements and trends. More technically, it is a stratified sample of carload waybills for all U.S. rail traffic submitted by those rail carriers terminating 4,500 or more revenue carloads annually. See 49 C.F.R. §§ 1244.1 to 1244.5.

Waybill data have broad applications and usage in national railroad policy and regulations, such as rate cases, costing systems, productivity studies, exemption decisions, and analyses supporting regulations. Waybill data are used by transportation practitioners, consultants, and law firms in preparing verified statements to be submitted in formal proceedings before the Board or other public agencies. Various federal agencies use the Waybill Sample as part of their informational and decision-making framework, and many states use it as a source of information for developing state transportation plans.

STB creates the Public Use Waybill file from the confidential Waybill Sample file. See the attached documents for more information. The "Reference Guide" document contains additional details on the variables and Standard Transportation Commodity Codes (STCC). In the "Creation of the Public Use Waybill Sample" document, STB provides more detail on the public use sample and how it is created. There is also a map of Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Areas and a document describing the Waybill sampling instructions.