Rail Freight Data: A Tool for Market and Regional Analysis

Abstract

The chief objective of this paper is to illustrate the usefulness of the Carload Waybill Statistics of the Interstate Commerce Commission in market research. Attention is centered on two tasks of regional analysis: (1) describing the outer limits of a region's market areas; (2) determining the region's pattern of specialization and exchange with other regions. Rail commodity statistics are valuable for these purposes not only because they represent more than one-half of the nation's intercity land freight tonnage, but also because rail freight typically consists of longer shipments than does highway freight.1 A secondary objective of this paper is to indicate how the statistical description of rail commodity movements might be fitted into the broader problem of formulating a functional conception of the geographic structure of an economic system. Despite the facts that the Waybill statistics are greatly needed in market and regional analysis, and that they are available free of charge, they seem to have been used very little in market and regional analysis. In most of the few market research publications using this information that have come to this writer's attention, the Waybill statistics have been used mainly to catalogue commodities shipped out of and into a state and to show the corresponding states of destination and origin respectively.2