Despite network congestion and macro-economic headwinds, intermodal achieved solid growth in 2015, according to the Intermodal Association of North America's fourth quarter and year-end Intermodal Market Trends and Statistics report. Domestic container gains more than offset declines in trailer volumes and marginal international increases to achieve overall 2.8 percent growth in total intermodal volumes.
In the Superman comics, the Bizarro World is a planet where normal people and events become strangely inverted. Which, in the world of global trade and supply chain, appears to be happening with increasing regularity.
An ultrasonic system to locate track defects and use of unmanned aerial vehicles for inspection of track, bridge and other freight rail infrastructure are among the technologies being explored by the railroad industry, according to a report from the Association of American Railroads.
By the time you read this, the largest containership ever to call a U.S. port will have visited the ports of Los Angeles and Oakland. It won't be the last. But will regulation and environmental pressures prevent carriers from developing the infrastructure needed to handle these seagoing behemoths?
As an asset class, railways have a worrying history. Railway mania in Britain in the 1840s left plenty of unwary investors nursing hefty losses; that episode sits in most lists of history's biggest speculative bubbles. But the prices of shares and bonds are dauntingly high, which has stoked interest in all manner of outlandish "alternative" assets in recent years. That, along with legal changes making it easier to repossess collateral that goes clickety-clack, may soon have investors funnelling cash into locomotives, carriages and goods wagons again.
