GLG News by Railcar Market Experts (EU)

Last week the ARCI released the railcar industries results for the fourth quarter of 2007, including 23,722 new orders, 14,862 deliveries, and a backlog of 75, 860 cars. Normally, those types of numbers would signal a rising production schedule in the year ahead. Instead, total deliveries in 2008 are...

    If low water levels used for cooling caused nuclear plants to operate less or back-off entirely at certain locations, this would be bullish for coal-fired (and natural gas-fired generation) and mitigate or cancel the concerns of an economic slowdown on coal-fired electricity...

Both Norfolk Southern (NSC) and CSX Transportation (CSX) posted strong earnings for the fourth quarter and the year in spite of traffic losses. Costs were tightly controlled on both systems and were reduced in proportion to the contractions in traffic, allowing all of the freight rate increases to be...

    Discussion has been made that a U.S. recession will cause a decline in coal consumption by the electric power sector.  This is unlikely based on coal’s relative cost to generate electricity and the historical coal consumption by the electric power sector in previous economic...

    Coal generators have been taking efforts to reduce sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from coal-fired power plants.  Regulated utilities are required to treat the reduced SO2 emissions differently than unregulated utilities, merchant generators, and independent power producers...

    The Pacific Northwest has a tremendous amount of installed hydroelectric capacity.  The first and second quarter earnings of the investor owned utilities in the Pacific Northwest very greatly with hydroelectric conditions.  Preliminary reports are robust for the snowpack...

    Van Eck’s Market Vectors Coal ETF (KOL) is designed to track the coal markets through the recently released Stowe Coal Index.  The index is comprised of 60 companies around the world in the coal industry.       Comments that follow discuss the...

Greenbrier’s reported earnings that were only one third of what had been expected, and even before the special charges due to more plant closing costs and currency losses, the earnings would have been 30% lower than had been recently estimated for the company.  Greenbrier tried to put a positive...

It is difficult to argue with Chris Versace’s facts regarding the past performance of the railcar builders and the railcar industry in general. This is a cyclical industry and the past is often prelude to the future. However, his broad assertions that roughly apply to the industry as a whole and perhaps...

Berkshire Hathaway announced that it had agreed to purchase Marmon Holdings, Inc. from the Pritzker family. Union Tank Car Company, the oldest railcar lessor and tank car builder in the nation, is owed by Marmon and has been the subject of rumors during the past year regarding a possible sale of the...