Oil Shipments by Rail Declining

Weekly oil shipments by rail can be found on the web at Weekly Carload Reports. And a summation of that data with charts can be found at Association of American Railroads  Freight Rail Traffic Data.

Rail Oil Carloads 3

Crude oil by rail basically started with the shale boom. Prior to that almost all oil was shipped by pipeline. Of course a lot of oil was trucked to the pipelines. The EIA says in the first seven months of 2014 8 percent of all us crude and refined products was shipped by rail. It looks like that percentage was increased somewhat in the second half of 2014.

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