Washington is fighting harder for coal than it has in years — emergency orders keeping aging power plants online, hundreds of millions committed to new coal capacity. So why does this week’s rail data show coal as the worst-performing commodity on the AAR board, the only major U.S. freight category still negative year-to-date?
In our latest SONAR Sitrep, “Coal’s Slow Fade,” we dig into the disconnect between coal policy and coal freight:
- Why U.S. coal carloads fell 9.5% week-over-week — and remain the lone red print among ten major AAR commodity groups, even as total carloads and intermodal volumes are both up YTD
- What SONAR’s RTOCO.USA index reveals once you stack the 6-month, 1-year, and 5-year averages side by side — a textbook structural downtrend, not a seasonal dip
- Why DOE emergency orders keeping plants like Michigan’s J.H. Campbell and Washington’s Centralia online haven’t translated into more coal moving by rail
- Where the real 2026 rail growth story is hiding (hint: it’s intermodal, not coal — ORAIL.USA and ORAILL.USA are both tracking above their 2023-2025 year-end levels)
- What to watch next: Henry Hub pricing, further DOE retirement orders, and coal export volumes as a possible offset to the domestic slide
Read the full Sitrep now:
📊 FreightWaves Market Monitor & Research — available at getfreightdata.com
📈 SONAR platform subscribers — find it in the Research section at GoSONAR.com
SONAR Sitreps are freight market intelligence briefings produced by the FreightWaves SONAR team, combining AAR rail traffic data with SONAR’s proprietary index library.
