Q2 Z2,(Q2) Z2(Q2) - Institute for Water Resources - U.S. Army

Table II.
No time information was available for grain truck transportation.
It was decided to take that time uniformly equal to one day both for the
transportation by truck to the river point and for the truck shipments to
Chicago. This assumption seems to correspond fairly well to the nature of
the rail time information which includes more than the time of moving the
grain. It allows some time for the loading, unloading and inspection of
the grain.
The time to transport the grain from river points to New Orleans
by barge has been estimated from data recording all the barge movements on
(1)
the Illinois River with the points and the dates of shipment and arrival.
Again some simple linear regressions have been computed on the basis of the
data concerning the movements from points on the Illinois River to New Orleans
and its vicinity. The results of these regressions were not much better than
the rail time regressions, but give also good estimates of the average time
of barge transportation from the various points on the Illinois River to the
Gulf. Table III gives the coefficients of these regressions. Note the
negative regression coefficient for the month of July. It is obviously wrong
but should not matter much here. The coefficient is relatively so small that
it produces practically the same time estimates for all the river points
which are relevant for this study (from Havana to Lockport).
It is worthwhile to mention that some fees are requested for the
inspection and weighing of the grain. As they are proportional to the quantities
processed, they have not been introduced in the computation of the differences
between net prices. (2) For the transportation by barge to New Orleans, five cents
per bushel as handling cost at the river station and at New Orleans have been
added to the cost of transportation.
(1) Provided by the U.S. corps of army engineers.
(2) See Board of Trade of the City of Chicago, 'The 109th Annual Report
Statistics 1966', 1967, pp. 183-184.
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