Industrial shippers of commodities like grain and petrochemicals want federal regulators to widen the scope of proposed rules that would require Class I railroads to report more data on their on-time service performance.
US rail regulator the Surface Transportation Board (STB) in September put the industry on notice that it intends to issue rules to require that each of the six biggest railroads, including Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, report two new categories of performance data to the agency.
The first would benchmark railroads' shipments against their original estimated time of arrival (OETA) and the second would measure "industry spot and pull" data, or ISP, to determine whether shipments are picked up and delivered within their planned service window.
The board action aims to address rail shippers' long-running concerns that unpredictable rail service is a wild card in their supply chains, as many shippers rely nearly completely on rail to get their goods to market.
The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), an industry group that lobbies for US refiners and petrochemical manufacturers, applauded the STB for working to address "chronic freight rail service failures."
The OETA is meant to track a carrier's targeted arrival time when it dispatches a cargo and then flag the percentage of weekly shipments that reach their destinations no later than 24 hours after an intended target, the STB said in its proposal.
The AFPM, whose members include companies like Dow, Occidental Chemical and Ineos who collectively ship about 2.5mn carloads a year, said OETA data should be broken out by region, terminal, and corridor "to reveal localized bottlenecks often masked by system averages."
As proposed, the STB's OETA measurement would apply to manifest train service, where trains haul an assortment of railcar types, and not to unit trains, which exclusively haul one railcar type or bulk commodity, such as coal, grain or crude.
Grain shippers and the US Department of Agriculture disagreed with the STB's decision to exclude unit train shipments from the OETA measurement.
The National Grain and Feed Association, whose members include Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and other biofuels makers, said that late unit train deliveries of commodities like grain, ethanol or coal "can result in proportionally greater harm to the shipper/receiver" than smaller manifest shipments.
The USDA agreed that unit train shipments should be included in the OETA measurement, and pointed out that about 75pc of US railed corn and soybean shipments in 2023 traveled in trains hauling more than 75 railcars, which would not be captured by manifest shipment data.
Demand for agricultural products is highly seasonal, and missed delivery windows "can halt processing lines, disrupt export programs, and force shippers to carry excess private car inventory to buffer uncertainty," the agency said.
The Association of American Railroads (AAR), which lobbies on behalf of Class I railroads, pushed back on industry requests to widen the OETA to include unit train shipments, and told the STB that several railroads do not currently generate the metrics.
Adding the reporting requirements "would add regulatory burden, waste resources, and misrepresent service on the network," the AAR said.
