A carrier assessing North American freight should read the railroad-group footnotes before treating the latest national labels as border demand. AAR’s October 7 report lists intermodal growth of 7.4% for its U.S. group, 0.7% for its Canadian group and 36.7% for its Mexican group in the week ending October 3. The categories do not sort every movement by the country in which it occurred.
The PDF’s Canadian table includes U.S. and Mexico operations of CPKC and CN. Its U.S. table excludes U.S. operations of those two railroads and GMXT. The Mexican table includes GMXT’s U.S. and Mexico operations while excluding CPKC’s Mexico operation. A train movement’s geography and the reporting group attached to its railroad are therefore different pieces of information.
That distinction changes the reader question. The Mexican group’s 36.7% intermodal increase does not establish that containers crossing the U.S.–Mexico border increased by that percentage. Some operations geographically in Mexico are recorded in another group, while the Mexican group includes operations north of the border. The table also does not identify a customs crossing or the truck leg connected to it.
Scale adds another boundary. The week’s intermodal counts were 299,001 units in the U.S. group, 73,192 in the Canadian group and 14,179 in the Mexican group. Together they equal the North American total of 386,372, up 6.9%. The largest percentage is attached to the smallest group; it cannot be substituted for the aggregate growth rate.
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For an illustrative bid review, a customer may point to the Mexican group’s increase to support a larger truck commitment. Ask which booked shipments will use the proposed truck leg and when they will be released. If the added rail units belong to another operating segment, the percentage supplies no evidence for that commitment. If actual shipments are confirmed, price the work from the equipment and time required.
Keep the weekly report and its grouping rules together in the planning file. It supplies a timely comparison of reporting networks; a shipment record establishes where the freight is moving. Matching those two levels makes the public data useful without turning a country label into an unsupported claim about border throughput.