AI Analysis: Railway industry operating statistics by mainline companies

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 23100055 provides nearly four decades of annual railway operating data (1986–2024) across 29 metrics for Canada's major mainline companies — Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, VIA Rail, and a combined total. The dataset's values are heavily right-skewed, ranging from 0 to nearly 11.9 billion, with a mean of ~345 million versus a median of just ~1 million, reflecting the vast differences in scale across operating metrics. Long-term trends show stable growth in key indicators like Total Train-Kilometres, with no extreme statistical outliers detected across the full historical period.

Key Findings

• The dataset contains 3,059 non-null records across 116 unique time series vectors, tracking 29 operating metrics for 4 railway entities from 1986 to 2024.
• Values are strongly right-skewed: the mean (~345 million) is roughly 345 times larger than the median (~1 million), driven by a small number of very large figures reaching nearly 11.9 billion.
• At least 25% of all recorded values are zero or near-zero, suggesting many metrics are not applicable or not reported for certain companies or years.
• Total freight car-kilometres leads individual statistics with a median of ~4.1 billion, while passenger-related metrics are far smaller — passenger car-kilometres has a median of just ~57.9 million.
• Each of the top 8 most frequently reported statistics contains exactly 111 records, indicating consistent annual reporting throughout the dataset's coverage period.
• No data points exceeded the ±2 standard deviation threshold for Total Train-Kilometres, confirming a stable and predictable long-term trend across the nearly 40-year period.
• Correlation analysis across 29 variables revealed clusters of strongly related metrics, indicating that freight volume, train-kilometres, and tonne-kilometres tend to move together over time.