Monthly railcar loadings

[farming101]

2008 was the year prices for all commodities went to the moon.
The next year exports went into the dumper.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.

[westernvicki]

101:
Do us a favour condense the following timeline: 2011/ 2014.
Overlap Production

Vegetable oil cars & Potash
Grain cars & crude oil cars:
totals and if possible by destination corridor or if not by aggregate




Month by month...
I am curious to see what you will find.

[farming101]

Westernvicki will do.

[westernvicki]

101

The graph will be interesting but indeed the real story is that no matter what the history shows, the future of Canadian export industry is dependent upon a system that is reliable and responsible. What type of performance is necessary to enable diversity, drive efficiency & competition so as Canadian primary producers do not pay as a % shipping costs reduce the profitability necessary for viable operations.

What you cannot graph is the cost of inefficiency, the ancillary charges paid which added to the costs of shipping and created the wide gap in prices.

[TOM4CWB]

Western,

No one in their right mind... would narrow basis significantly... as both grainco's and end users are in a state of frustration and sick of the lack of credible trust our logistics can provide needed grain products.

[farming101]

Westernvicki, below is an effort to chart what you highlighted above.
Lots of caution advised in using the numbers as a "final tally"

An example is the line denoting canola oil. The CANSIM tables highlight that this section of the railway report includes an array of different products; animal fats for example. However the major portion of this section is indeed canola oil in various stages of refinement and it will be noted that the numbers are very stable. As someone said canola oil ships regularly or there are big problems keeping a crush plant running smoothly.

The crude oil line includes fuel oils.

The grains line does not include milled grain products. It should be noted that the government order to the railways included all schedule 2 grain products which is whole grains and all mill products of every grain grown on the prairies save one or two very minor ones.
These numbers are all extracted from the CANSIM monthly railway report. To try and use these numbers to designate corridor destinations and get it all to add up would be quite a trick.
There are meaningful ways to chart corridor shipments and probably the Grain Monitor's quarterly reports are a good place to start.(They haven't even published the last quarter of the 2013-14 crop year yet!)Maybe will do one in a while that presents data relating to US shipments and port shipments. It is out there, just not in the railway carload data.

With a little study you will see that the chart shows that grain shipments are influenced by potash and now oil.
Notice in Jan 14 oil and potash car loadings increased and grains decreased. Same thing occurred in Dec 14. Potash peak shipping has traditionally been spring.
Also clear with this chart and the first one is that grain movement by rail peaks in spring and fall. Been that way forever. Some years May has been the month with the largest loadings for the whole year.
Did not overlay production. Not sure if that is what you were thinking of or not.
<a href="http://photobucket.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums/cc421/farming101/Select%20data%20Rail%20Car%20loadings%202011%20201 4_zpshrtwvsq0.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo Select data Rail Car loadings 2011 2014_zpshrtwvsq0.jpg"/></a>