Source: each individual railroad's investor relations website. Mainly longer-haul freight as short lines Genessee & Wyoming and Florida East Coast are excluded from Class I.
What?: Weekly carloads by American Association of Railroads (AAR) type. Note that several railroads have different classifications by business line, but these all use the AAR for consistent comparison.
Still, since some loads travel on multiple railroads, these figures tend to overstate rail volumes very slightly and they don't match precisely with AAR totals as a result. The individual railroad data can be particularly helpful in regional and intra-regional analysis.
Intermodal loads are specifically excluded from the definition of a rail carload but still a critical part of overall railroad volumes. Just don't say intermodal carloads around railroaders, they will scoff.
Intermodal loads by the AAR definition are not just the prototypical retail freight, but also include volumes which the LTL and parcel providers put on the railroads.
Analysis: aggregation of the entire North American Class I rail network (except FerroMex, which doesn’t report), prior-year comparisons, quarterly and annual sums.
Where?: CSX and NS essentially own the eastern US rail networks, and UP and BN own the western US networks. The Canadian railroads both operate transcontinental networks in the US & Canada, and with the CP-KS merger, that network will be uniquely transcontinental both north-south and east-west.