The numbers are truly impressive. The AAR counted 259,141 petroleum carloads last week. Just over a year ago, the count was just shy of 120,000 carloads for the comparable week. And that represented a rise of nearly 30% from the same week in 2011. Rail transportation of crude oil and petroleum products has nearly tripled in three years.

Coal shipments by rail still outnumber petroleum shipments by about eight to one, but coal carloads are down 5.6% year-to-date, compared with last year. And the number of carloads of grain has fallen 16% in the same period.

Among the railroads, the big winner is the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF), which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) and plies the rails along the northern tier, including the oil-producing states of North Dakota and Montana. Railroads that depend more heavily on coal shipments, like CSX Corp. (NYSE: CSX), Norfolk Southern Corp. (NYSE: NSC) and Union Pacific Corp. (NYSE: UNP), have all experienced double-digit percentage drops in coal ships, weighing on revenues and profits.

Southwest Airlines announced Wednesday morning that its board of directors has quadrupled its quarterly dividend payment to $0.04 per share from $0.01 per share. The increase is for shareholders of record at the close of business on June 5, 2013, and will be paid on June 26, 2013.

Another boost is coming from the buyback plan. The existing $1 billion share repurchase program is being expanded to $1.5 billion. On top of that, an initial $250 million in its common stock will be repurchased under an accelerated stock repurchase program.

The new dividend will amount to a yield of 1.1%, based on the $13.98 close on Tuesday. Shares currently are trading higher by almost 3% at $14.39. That $1.5 billion share buyback compares to a market cap of $10.41.

As we have said before, United Continental Holdings Inc. (NYSE: UAL) is the main dividend sinner in the sector. The airline is considered the healthiest legacy carrier now that United and Continental have amalgamated into one company, and its market cap is $11.6 billion now that shares have rallied a whopping 70% in the past six months.

The American Association of Railroads (AAR) has done the work and even though the group has a stake in the outcome, the AAR deserves a lot of props just for digging through more than a dozen years of data.

Between 2002 and 2012, there were a total of 129 reported incidents of crude oil spills on U.S. railroads compared with a total of 1,849 reported pipeline incidents in the same period. On average a railroad oil spill dumps 738 gallons of the black stuff compared with an average pipeline spill of 10,777 gallons per spill. Total gallons spilled from rail cars was 95,256 compared with 19,926,540 gallons spilled as a result of pipeline ruptures.

For every million barrels moved by rail an estimated 0.38 gallons were spilled, compared an estimated spill rate of 0.88 gallons were spilled for every million barrels moved.

Looking at the number of barrels moved, though, presents a slightly different version of the story. The AAR reported earlier this year that a total of 233,800 carloads of crude oil were moved by rail in 2012. One carload holds between 600 and 700 barrels. Taking a midpoint of 650 barrels per tanker car, rail transport moved about 152 million barrels of crude last year.

Pipelines moved about 51 million barrels of crude in January 2013 alone according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Those movements were between Petroleum Administration Defense Districts (PADDs) and do not include intra-Padd shipments, which would raise the number even higher.

As more and more carloads of crude oil travel on the nation’s railroads, the number of spills is likely to rise, but it is very unlikely that a single rail accident could dump over 800,000 gallons of crude, as did the 2010 spill following a pipeline rupture near the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.

Moving crude oil by rail is safe and, in fact, appears to be considerably safer than moving oil by pipelines. That’s good, since U.S. railroads expect to carry even more of the stuff this year and next.

Revenue in the company’s Intermodal segment rose 15% to $796 million, due mainly to volume growth and higher revenue per load. Operating income rose 22% year-over-year in the segment.

The odd thing about Hunt’s growth is that it seems to have hit a wall at around $0.67 a share after a big jump of $0.10 a share in the second quarter of last year. The intermodal business represents nearly 75% of the company’s revenues. The trucking segment has watched revenues shrink and posted just $1.1 million in operating income in the first quarter.

The company did not offer any further guidance in its published release. The consensus estimate for the second quarter calls for EPS of $0.77 on revenue of $1.4 billion. For the 2013 fiscal year, EPS is reckoned at $3.05 on revenue of $5.65 billion. Unless Hunt gets a big boost somewhere, those numbers look awfully optimistic.

One might think that with the boom in oil and fuel transportation that has hit U.S. railroads that trucks might also be picking up some of that business. Hunt does not say if that is true for the company, but there are no signs of it if its true.

Hunt’s shares are down about 3.6% in after-hours trading at $71.58 in a 52-week range is $50.56 to $75.73. Thomson Reuters had a consensus analyst price target of around $72.50 before today’s report.

While housing construction added more than 17,000 jobs in February, one surprise boost came from some 20,800 jobs added in the motion picture and sound recording industries. Those $12 movie tickets must help a lot. Another 16,000 of the added payrolls came from temporary help services. The one figure that stood out above and beyond any rational explanation was that the good old U.S. Postal Service somehow added about 4,500 more workers.

The U.S. Postal Service continues to lose money as it is bleeding cash to keep paying retiree pensions and benefits. So can someone please manage to explain how the USPS added jobs at a time that Saturdays are being dumped for delivery days? The USPS had some 603,100 workers in January and somehow rose to 607,600 workers on a seasonally adjusted basis in February. A gain of 4,500 jobs might not sound like much to a government pencil pusher, but it sure does to those of us taxpayers who do not really believe that taxpayers aren’t ultimately on the hook for the ”independently funded” Postal Service.

While the USPS reported a quarterly loss of $1.3 billion back in early February, the one area of growth was a 4.7% growth in Shipping and Packaging. No wonder the Postal Service is going to continue package deliveries on Saturdays. First class mail continued to decline and the Postal Service’s effort to cut first class mail delivery on Saturdays may save as much as $2 billion. So, this begs a couple questions. Does the Post Office need more workers to handle more and more catalog mailings or junk mail? Didn’t all the partisan mail-outs for donations end in November as well?

The USPS loss announcement in February also said that the first quarter is traditionally the Postal Service’s strongest financial quarter due to the holiday mailing and shipping season. Maybe that explains the hirings with a lag of some sort. The problem there is that the first quarter is actually the fourth calendar quarter and it ends on December 31 and the added payrolls were for February.

Needless to say, we wanted an answer of how the payrolls at the USPS grew by 4,500 people in February. So, we placed two calls to spokespeople and are awaiting an answer about how the 4,500 jobs were added. We did speak with two USPS contacts on Friday, but so far the explanation remains unanswered. If we get a response we will update this article.

This situation is one true head-scratcher at a time that budgets are supposedly tightening up. As we have no way to know what the boost is from until an answer is offered up, we chose a theoretical $30,000 per year for each of these 4,500 positions knowing that it may be higher. That comes to an extra $135 million per year from a group that is losing money. This $135 million figure may even be much higher when you consider insurance, pensions, and other benefits. It also does not include the added expenses that come with each new hire.

Saving a theoretical $135 million here and there is not going to save the Postal Service, and it is not going to save the out-of-control deficit spending that Washington D.C. is addicted to. That being said, a few hundred or a thousand instances of this sort of savings is what it will take to get government spending in line with real budgeting. Of course, the government hasn’t operated on a budget for years now.

The press release showed that all net proceeds from the stock sale will be received by DryShips, so the selling shareholder will receive all of the proceeds rather than Ocean Rig adding any capital into its treasury. This is not likely to be the last share sale either as DryShips is still expected to own approximately 61.3% of Ocean Rig’s outstanding shares after the offering.

Ocean Rig UDW closed at $17.55, so this would add some $87.8 million into the DryShips cash balance if the share sale managed to somehow go off at the closing price. Ocean Rig is worth some $2.3 billion in market cap versus $893 million in market cap for DryShips.

Over the last year DryShips shares have traded in a range of $1.46 to $3.84. Its closing bell price of $2.16 generates a market value of about $893 million.

For the quarter, the package delivery giant posted adjusted diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $1.32 on revenues of $14.57 billion. In the same period a year ago, the company reported EPS of $1.28 on revenues of $14.17 billion. Fourth-quarter results also compare to the Thomson Reuters consensus estimates for $1.38 EPS and $14.43 billion in revenues.

For the full year, UPS posted adjusted EPS of $4.53 on revenues of $54.13 billion, compared with EPS of $4.35 on revenues of $53.11 billion in 2011. The consensus estimate called for EPS of $4.58 on revenues of $54 billion.

On a GAAP basis, UPS reported a quarterly EPS loss of $1.83 related to a $3 billion noncash after-tax charge for pension benefits. On a GAAP basis for the full year, EPS totaled $0.83. The company also estimated that the effects of Hurricane Sandy reduced EPS by about $0.05.

The company’s CEO said:

2012 presented its challenges, most notably weak global trade. Nonetheless, UPS executed well, delivering superior service to customers. Despite modest macro growth expectations for 2013 and uncertainty in the U.S. caused by the lack of progress in Washington, the UPS business model will deliver consistent results, with operating profit growth in all segments.

UPS noted that spending during the recent holiday season was “slightly below expectations.”

The company also officially announced yesterday that it had dropped its bid for TNT Express, following an EU decision prohibiting the proposed acquisition.

For 2013, UPS forecast EPS in the range of $4.80 to $5.06. The company also raised its estimate of stock repurchases in 2013 from $1.3 billion to $4 billion.

UPS shares are down 2.2% in premarket trading, at $79.42 in a 52-week range of $69.56 to $82.76. Thomson Reuters had a consensus analyst price target of around $87.70 before today’s report.

The comments on each are as follows:

• Waste Management Inc. (NYSE: WM) “Raising target price based on a 7.5x multiple on our normalized EBITDA estimate of $3.6 billion. Our 7.5x multiple is a slight discount to what the sector trades in a normalized environment given choppy execution. raised target to $38 from $35.”
• Republic Services (NYSE: RSG) “Raising TP based on an 8x multiple on our normalized EBITDA estimate of $2.6 billion; raising target to $38 from $34.”
• JB Hunt Transport Services (NASDAQ: JBHT) “reported 4Q12 EPS of $0.70. The company noted that it intends to focus on developing the LTL mode. That should put further pressure on revenue per load, but LTL freight carries higher margins. Our O.R. forecast in this division was largely unchanged.”
• Oshkosh Corporation (NYSE: OSK) “reported F1Q13 EPS of $0.60 (vs cons $0.31) and management raised its 2013 EPS to $2.80-$3.05. While expectations were low for Oshkosh going into the print, execution was solid, driving increased confidence in the company’s ability to hit its longer-term 2015 EPS targets.”
• Teekay Corporation (NYSE: TK) “remains well positioned to expand into both the LNG and Offshore Energy sectors. While Teekay has had its hands full with the construction of the FPSO Knarr nearing completion (early 2014) and the repair/upgrade of the FPSO Banff (restarting in Q4 2013) we expect Teekay to return to making project investments in the next few quarters.”

24/7 Wall St. has looked at many figures to generate an idea of what things cost for the Super Bowl. We tracked the ticket prices for a physical seat at the game, the price of a TV commercial, the many millions of viewers, chicken wing and pizza consumption, beer consumption and more. We also have shown some basic figures for New Orleans on a local level to see what sort of expectations will be there for hotel rooms, restaurants and sports bars, energy use and so on. Another issue is the team economics, with team salaries and pay for the big game.

Raw Dollars for the Big Game

The lowest priced ticket on the Ticketmaster website was $2,387, and the highest priced ticket was $13,120. Those were per-ticket prices as of 2:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2013. Stubhub listed tickets starting at $2,119 per ticket. A check on the Ticketmaster site on Thursday, January 24, showed that the cheap tickets were now “only” $2,188 per seat. Regular football game seating at the Superdome accommodates roughly 69,700. Even just at the base price, and averaging the two lowest ticket prices as the norm, this comes to $2,253 for an average entry-level ticket. If all 69,700 seats averaged this, the tally comes to just over $157 million.

What about the Super Bowl 2013 TV commercials? Superbowl-ads.com shows that Super Bowl TV ads are selling for up to $3.8 million on average for the 30-second spots, but CBS reportedly is already sold out for the most part, and some ads sold for more than $4 million for 30-second spots. That average is up by $300,000 from the $3.5 million published rate for the 2012 Super Bowl, but we caution that the figure may change before the final game day. Advertisers were listed as follows: Anheuser-Busch, AXE, Best Buy, Cars.com, Century 21, Coca-Cola, Doritos, Fiat, Ford/Lincoln, GoDaddy.com, Hyundai, Kia, Kraft’s MiO, Mars, Mercedes-Benz, Milk Processor Education Program, Paramount, PepsiCo, Skechers, SodaStream, Taco Bell, Tide — Proctor & Gamble, Toyota, Volkswagen and Wonderful Pistachios. A more recent look shows some 31 advertisers, but some ads are longer and some are multiple ads. If we just take 35 ads, this comes to roughly $133 million spent by advertisers at the $3.8 million average. And again, some television ads supposedly sold for more than $4 million.

The Nielsen Company showed that the broadcast of Super Bowl XLVI on NBC had an average audience of 111.3 million viewers and was said to be the most-watched television program of all time. The game was viewed in roughly 53.3 million households, with a 47.8 U.S. household rating.

Food and Beer Trends

According to the National Chicken Council, Americans will eat some 1.23 billion chicken wings over Super Bowl weekend. This is projected to be down about 1% from a year ago, but the drop is due to prices impacting production rather than demand. Wholesale wings are currently at about $2.11 a pound (in the Northeast), the highest on record at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up 26 cents or 14% from a year earlier. The group cites Nielsen showing that fresh and prepared wings totaled $1.6 billion in sales for the 52 weeks ending Nov. 24, 2012, but its graph shows that wings are at record sales by more than 2:1, with almost 16 million chicken wings sold during Super Bowl 46 in 2012.

What about pizza? Super Bowl is the busiest day of the year for pizza sales, and figures from 2012 showed an expected 4 million pizzas being sold by restaurants alone. That is not counting the frozen pizzas from grocery stores nor the diehards who make their own pizzas from scratch. Statistic Brain said that Pizza Hut sold 2 million pizzas during the Super Bowl in 2012. Domino’s does not readily break out sales, but it shows that Super Bowl Sunday is the busiest of its top five pizza days, and that Domino’s delivery drivers will log about 4 million miles on Super Bowl Sunday. A report from Nation’s Restaurant News in 2012 showed that it is about 11 million slices, or 1.4 million whole pizzas.

Saveonbrew.com had an infographic for the 2013 Super Bowl showing the following: 50 million cases of beer will be consumed, resulting in more than 2 billion gallons of water used to flush away that much beer consumed, with roughly 7 million people calling in sick after the Super Bowl.

City Stats: San Francisco, Baltimore, New Orleans

The U.S. Census issued a report using the 2011 American Community Survey. Those living in San Francisco, ostensibly 49ers fans, had a median household income of $69,894 with a median home value of $719,800. Baltimore residents, ostensibly Ravens fans, had a median income of $38,721 and the median home value was $154,400.

These compare to national averages of $50,502 in median income and a median of $173,600 for owner-occupied homes. The averages in New Orleans are $35,041 in median household income and $185,400 in median home value of owner-occupied homes.

Local Stats for New Orleans

Super Bowl 47 will be the 10th Super Bowl held in the Big Easy, but this is the first time since Hurricane Katrina. The city’s “Katrina Mayor,” Ray Nagin, has been charged with 21 felony counts, including bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and filing false income tax returns. His arraignment was moved back from immediately before the Super Bowl weekend to February 20.

The Greater New Orleans Hotel & Lodging Association (NOHLA) reported that tourism officials project some 125,000 to 150,000 people will be in town for Super Bowl weekend, with 75,000 at the game and the rest in to be around the happenings. The association also said that it counts some 33,000 hotel rooms in the area, although we have seen larger figures than this in prior articles. A search on Hotels.com revealed as recently as Tuesday, Jan. 22, that the closest hotel not sold out had only one room left — in Chalmette, at $350 per night! An additional 214 hotels are listed as being NOT AVAILABLE from Feb. 2 to Feb. 4. The NOHLA said that the rooms have an average daily rate starting at $500 per night for three-star properties and $700 per night for four-star and five-star properties.

The New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau was quoted as saying that the Super Bowl will generate $300 million to $400 million in direct spending. The New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation said that the Super Bowl is expected to have a $432 million economic impact on the city. The Superdome has undergone $336 million in renovations since Katrina, followed closely by $300 million in improvements to Louis Armstrong International Airport.

Energy usage at the Superdome and at supporting facilities was listed as roughly 4,600 MW of electricity. The generation of this electricity will result in approximately 3.8 million pounds of CO2 emissions. Entergy Corp. said that it will donate carbon credits to offset or neutralize the impact of these emissions.

The NOHLA showed that round-trip airplane tickets from Baltimore were averaging about $800, and about $1,100 from San Francisco. Smaller boutique-style hotels that usually go for $300 to $500 a night during Mardi Gras are as high as $800 during the Super Bowl. Rooms at some major hotels are up to $2,000 a night.

Player and Finance Factoids

With the head coaches both being Harbaugh brothers, this is a first. The nicknames for Super Bowl 47 are already coming on strong: the Bros. Bowl, the Harbowl and the SuperBaugh.

The salaries for each team in 2012, according to Spotrac.com, include base salary, signing bonuses and other bonuses. This also includes active contracts, dead money, injured reserve and a cap rollover. The rounded cap figure for each team was listed as $130.9 million for the Ravens and $124.4 million for the 49ers. In 2012, the pay per player for the Super Bowl was a record $88,000 on the winning team and a record $44,000 of the losing team. That figure for a winning game is expected to rise to $92,000 next year and to reach $130,000 in the year 2020.

ESPN’s NFL site shows that the Ravens regular season offensive stats were 352.5 yards per game, versus 361.8 yards per game for the 49ers. The Ravens led in passing at 233.7 yards per game, versus 206.1 yards per game for the 49ers. The 49ers led in rushing yards at 155.7 yards per game, versus 118.8 yards for the Ravens. Defense is where the stats are wider: the Ravens allowed 350.9 yards per game, versus 294.4 yards per game for the 49ers.

CSX warned that its coal shipment volumes to power plants in the United States could be down by 5% to 10% in 2013. This is after domestic coal shipments were down 21% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier. The trends were like that all year, with a 26% drop in the third quarter and a 27% drop in the first half of 2012.

Some investors and market pundits want to blame low natural gas prices, but the environment of regulating coal into oblivion by the current regime in Washington, D.C., has been a known risk for some time. What was interesting is that some coal stocks have recovered even above where they were in late October and the very start of November, when it was looking possible that Mitt Romney might have had a better chance of beating President Obama. After all, Romney was the “I Like Coal!” guy and President Obama has favored renewables.

Here is how the coal players are faring, and we even posted the ”Romney rally” highs of late October to early November for reference:

CONSOL Energy Inc. (NYSE: CNX) is up 0.3% at $32.83, against a 52-week range of $26.41 to $38.42. The Romney rally high was up around $36, but shares were back to $32 by the end of November.

Peabody Energy Corp. (NYSE: BTU) is down 0.5% at $26.12, against a 52-week range of $18.78 to $38.96. The Romney rally high was almost $30, but shares were back under $25 briefly by the end of November.

Arch Coal Inc. (NYSE: ACI) is up 0.7% at $7.88, against a 52-week range of $5.16 to $15.94. The Romney rally high was $8.79, and shares were back at $6.50 by the end of November.

Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (NYSE: ANR) is up 0.4% at $9.99, against a 52-week range of $5.28 to $23.68. The Romney rally high was $9.80, but shares were back down to $7 or so by the end of November.

All investors really need to do is to go back and see what Martin Sosnoff of Atalanta Sosnoff Capital told Forbes for the year-end special edition of “Get Rich from Obama” in his outlook. He said to sell the Market Vectors Coal ETF (NYSEMKT: KOL) by saying, “Stocks like Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources selling the single digits for good reasons.” He noted that depressed coal prices and leverage could spell disaster, and he even said the Romney rally in these stocks is over.

The Market Vectors Coal ETF (NYSEMKT: KOL) is down 0.6% so far this morning at $25.68, against a 52-week range of $21.49 to $37.40. The Romney rally high was $26.20, but this was challenging $23 by the end of November.

The good news for the coal sector is that Wall St. is not throwing in the towel on coal. If you saw CSX’s commentary about coal on CNBC this morning, you might have expected yet another round of pain. The split decision may be that the stock market tries to act as a discounting mechanism. If coal is expected to remain weak for much of 2013, maybe the market is trying to say that this is discounted and factored in.