Railcar Boom Being Fueled by the Bakken Boom -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Link here.

Greenbrier Cos Inc. and American Railcar Industries Inc. can’t expand their fleets fast enough as demand for sand used in the hunt for oil and natural gas helps power U.S. railcar production to a three-year high.

“Everybody is asking for cars right now,” Dale Davies, chief financial officer at American Railcar, said in a telephone interview from his Saint Charles, Missouri, office. “Everybody is trying to ramp their capacities up as much as they can. We’re pretty much full for 2012.”

Folks have been writing me asking about investment opportunities in railcars, wondering which companies to look at.

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I think I've counted not less than ten (10) crude-by-rail oil loading facilities built or being built in the Bakken. It is amazing to see them being built. These are not going to be small operations. With the death of the Keystone XL pipeline the CBR industry will accelerate.

In this case, the rail enthusiasts see huge demand for trains hauling gold.

Trains transport as much as 2,500 tons of sand for a single hydraulic fracturing project, which involves splintering open tiny cracks about a mile beneath the earth’s surface to unlock stores of petroleum and natural gas. When the so-called fracking is complete, a different set of railcars hauls out the thousands of barrels of newly discovered fuel.

The data points at the linked article are incredible.