Industrial Activities and Railway Freight: Revealing Spatiotemporal Characteristics and their Correlation Relationship

Understanding the relationship between industrial activities and railway freight may offer insights for transforming railway freight services in response to new economic situations. Existing studies have examined the impact of national GDP or economic structure on total freight traffic. However, limited studies link the values of subdivided sectors with the freight traffic of subdivided goods categories, even though this linkage allows for the targeted optimization of transport resource allocation. This research reveals how industrial sectors influence various railway goods categories in China’s Yangtze River Delta region. Using the standard deviation ellipse method and regression models, we focus on their spatial distribution similarities, and correlation relationships. The agglomeration levels of various industrial sectors, expressed through location entropy, are calculated to analyze their impact on rail freight volume for different cargo types. The findings show a distinct difference in the spatial agglomeration characteristics of non-bulk and bulk railway freight in the Yangtze River Delta region. Non-bulk goods exhibit increasingly pronounced agglomeration, whereas bulk goods show an increasingly pronounced dispersion. The spatial distribution similarity between non-bulk railway freight and industry is higher than that between bulk freight and industry, and this similarity has been increasing annually. Different industrial sectors exert varying influence on railway freight. The mid-end and low-end industrial sectors distinctly affect railway freight traffic, whereas the high-end industrial sector has an unobvious impact. Findings also show that improving industrial sectors’ agglomeration promotes railway freight traffic, regardless of whether the industrial sectors are low-end or high-end.