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.

This graph shows the costs of transporting grain from the United States to Mexico from origin to destination in dollars per metric ton.

This data shows regional volumes by quarter and year, and it includes a share variable,which is the ratio of that region's quarterly volumes to total volumes across all regions that quarter.

Regional quarterly average refrigerated truck rates ($/mile) by mileage category: a) local movements–500 miles and less, b) short distance movements–between 501 and 1,500 miles, c) medium distance movements–between 1,501 and 2,500 miles, and d) long distance movements–greater than 2,500 miles. Regions represent origination points for movements.

Quarterly totals of refrigerated truck load volumes (tonnage) from U.S. origin shipping areas and cross-border movements from Mexico and Canada for individual fruit and vegetable varieties.

Note: Entries marked zero tons were registered commodity movements, but the sum of all shipment volumes totaled less than 1 ton.

Quarterly average refrigerated truck rates ($/mile, $/truckload) from origin shipping areas to destination receiving city.

Weekly spot market availability for refrigerated truck movements at origin shipping areas for individual commodities. Availability is represented numerically as 1 = “Shortage”, 2 = “Slight Shortage”, 3 = “Adequate”, 4 = “Slight Surplus”, 5 = “Surplus”.