For example, did you know that average maximum train length is a thing? It is! And according to Union Pacific’s second-quarter earnings release, its maximum average train length increased by 2 percent from the year-ago period, to an all-time high of 9,544 feet. That’s 1.8 miles long, and we’re pretty sure we got stuck waiting for one of those trains at a rail crossing in upstate New York last month.

Anyway, using the nifty Calcbench export-to-Excel capabilities we talk about so much, we even charted out maximum average train length for the last four years. See Figure 1, below.

We’re not rail industry analysts so we don’t quite know what to do with this disclosure, other than to marvel at its inherent coolness. 

Nor is maximum average rain length the only interesting disclosure Union Pacific makes. Its earnings release is full of oddball disclosures, such as:

• Quarterly freight car velocity of 201 daily miles per car was flat.

• Quarterly locomotive productivity was 134 gross ton-miles (GTMs) per horsepower day, a 6% improvement.

• Quarterly workforce productivity improved 5 percent to 1,031 car miles per employee.

• Fuel consumption rate of 1.08, measured in gallons of fuel per thousand GTMs, improved 1 percent.

For all the above disclosures, you can quickly export them to Excel and compare them to prior periods’ disclosures, to generate charts such as ours above. That is, you can use Calcbench to model nuanced metrics of corporate performance quickly and easily, in visual formats easy to drop into a research note or client presentation.

We only chose Union Pacific because it happened to file this week, and because we went through a diehard Thomas the Tank Engine phase in kindergarten. You could just as easily find key performance metrics from other companies in other industries too, such as airlines, banking, retail, and more. 

Indeed, if you know an industry with particularly interesting performance metrics, drop us a line at info@calcbench.com and let us know! We’re always happy to dig into new types of data and come up with other cool industry reports. 

#KPI #earnings #railroads #finance #economics