CSX at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Efficiency and Growth

On Wednesday, 17 September 2025, CSX Corporation (NASDAQ:CSX) presented at the JPMorgan U.S. All Stars Conference, offering insights into its strategic direction. The company highlighted operational improvements and network efficiency, alongside challenges like mixed carload performance and restructuring costs. Despite these hurdles, CSX remains optimistic about growth through strategic partnerships and technology investments.

Key Takeaways

• CSX anticipates 1% to 2% growth driven by industrial development.
• Strategic partnerships, especially with BNSF and CN, are crucial to service enhancement.
• Technology investments focus on AI-driven decision-making for operational fluidity.
• Mixed performance in carload segments, with strong intermodal and domestic coal offset by weaker merchandise.
• Completion of the Howard Street Tunnel project is a significant infrastructure milestone.

Financial Results

• Intermodal performance has been strong, with further improvements expected.
• Domestic coal demand remains robust, particularly in utility coal.
• Merchandise segments, especially agriculture, food, and chemicals, show weakness.
• Restructuring charges of $15 to $20 million expected in Q3.
• Advisory fees projected at $5 to $10 million for both Q3 and Q4.
• A sequential margin improvement of 550 basis points from Q1 to Q2 was noted.

Operational Updates

• Network performance has rebounded to 2023 levels since May.
• Investments in technology aim to improve safety and operational decision-making.
• The Howard Street Tunnel project completion allows for double-stack clearance on the I-95 corridor.
• Real-time operations portal enhances monitoring and decision-making capabilities.

Future Outlook

• CSX aims to expand the overall market rather than focus solely on market share.
• New intermodal service with BNSF from Phoenix to Birmingham underscores partnership focus.
• Industrial development projects are expected to drive 1% to 2% growth.
• The company is preparing for potential industry consolidation impacts.

Q&A Highlights

• Haulage agreements offer more flexibility than trackage rights.
• CSX aims for seamless customer experiences across multiple railroads.
• The Surface Transportation Board is expected to scrutinize proposed industry consolidations.
• Customers prefer rail for safety, economic, and environmental benefits.

In conclusion, CSX’s presentation at the JPMorgan U.S. All Stars Conference demonstrated its commitment to operational excellence and strategic growth. For more detailed insights, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - JPMorgan U.S. All Stars Conference:

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Thanks for joining us here. I’m Brian Austin Beck. I cover air freight and service transportation for J.P. Morgan. We’re excited to have a fireside chat here with CSX. We have Joe Hinrichs, who’s the President and Chief Executive Officer, Sean Pelkey, CFO. We’ve got Matt Korn, Head of Strategy in the office as well here. It’s great to have you guys here. I know we got some slides to go through. It’s a little bit maybe early for our friends on the East Coast, but I’m sure we can wake up and get them up to speed because of a few things going on in the industry. Why don’t we go ahead and kick off with the slides, the presentation, talk about the network, and then we’ll jump into the conversation. Thanks again for coming back to London.

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Thanks for having us, Brian. Joe’s going to take us through a couple slides.

Joe Hinrichs, President and Chief Executive Officer, CSX: Yeah, thanks, Brian, and great to be here. I wanted to take just a few minutes up front to kind of level set. We’ve got investors here, and you know many of them know us very well, but some don’t as much. I just want to give everybody kind of a sense. We’ll go through forward-looking disclosures here, which will cover all of our comments, but just want to give folks a sense of when you think about East Coast railroading, what is it that makes CSX different and unique? I think there’s a lot of things on this page. I’ll spend just a second on them. I think one of the most powerful is we’re the best run railroad in the East and arguably in North America in terms of our operating discipline and the efficiency at which we run our operations. We also have a fantastic reach.

When you look at our network, we’ve got the core triangle that goes across from Chicago to New York, down the I-95 corridor, the Eastern Seaboard, and right up the Southeastern part of our network. We also extend all the way up into New England with our recent acquisition of Pan Am Railways and all the way down into the state of Florida uniquely. We’re in a position right now where we’ve got a number of railroads that are very interested and eager to work with CSX. We’ll talk more about that as we get into the conversation. We are leveraging that competitive position that we’re in. We’ve announced a couple of partnerships that we’ve already entered into, and we’re working on a number of other things as well that we think will serve us very well in the near and the midterm as we go forward.

Our business is quite diversified. A majority of what we move is within the segments that make up merchandise. That’s driven by the industrial economy, which in the United States has not been particularly robust the last couple of years. That being said, in 2023 and 2024, both of those years, our merchandise business exceeded the pace of industrial production growth, which is the first time that we’ve been able to deliver that kind of outperformance in over a decade. The intermodal business is a growth segment for us. It is up in the third quarter here and doing quite well for us. We just announced a partnership with BNSF that will drive even more growth as we get into the fourth quarter, and we’ll get into the details of that.

The coal segment is an interesting one as well that we’ve said is likely to be flat over the next couple of years, but domestic is holding up a lot better than we expected it to going into the year. That is kind of a combination of weather-driven drawdown in utility stockpiles, but also the fact that there’s been huge electrical generation needs in the eastern U.S. with the advent of AI and increase in data centers. It has driven an extension of the life of the coal plants that we serve and an increase in the overall demand.

The export market has been down a little bit for us this year, which is due to global conditions, but also due to some unique idiosyncratic issues on our network, namely two fires at major mines that serve export production and output for CSX that will reverse as we get into next year. One of the most exciting stories that you’ll see on this page is the industrial development story. You’ve heard a lot about the President’s priority on bringing manufacturing back to the United States, and we often get asked, is it real? Are you seeing it? The answer is yes, absolutely we are. We’ve seen a ramp-up in the amount of inbound calls that we’ve been getting over the last year or two relative to customers that are looking to expand facilities that are already on our network or build brand new facilities.

I think CSX has a distinct competitive advantage here. Not only do we have that network reach that I talked about in the breadth, but we also have an extraordinarily strong team and a regional footprint to partner with developers and local authorities, local governments to bring new manufacturing facilities to our network. We have sites across the Southeast and the Midwest. That heat map shows you where all of this activity is taking place. If you overlay our network, which are those blue lines in the eastern U.S., you’ll see we are almost perfectly aligned with where all of this is occurring. We’ve had about 60 projects that have started up already this year. We had several that started last year as well. There is a multi-year ramp-up from those projects.

What we’ve said is over the next couple of years, all of this should net us 1% to 2% growth, mostly in merchandise, but highly diversified. It is not concentrated in a single segment. It is across many, many of the markets that we serve within merchandise. I’ll leave you with this, which is, you know, it’s been a challenging year for the industrial economy in the U.S. and also for CSX this year relative to the expectations that we had going into the year. As we begin to look forward to turning the page into 2026, there’s a lot to be excited about. The picture that you see there is the Howard Street Tunnel, a major infrastructure project that we’ve been talking about for a decade. We broke ground on the project officially February 1. We will be completing that project roughly in the next 10 days.

Very exciting to get to the end of that. That’s a 150 or so year-old tunnel that now is going to be double stack cleared. We’ve got a couple of bridges that we’ve got to raise, not us, but the state’s got to raise over the next couple of months. Once that is complete, we’ll have full double stack clearance on the I-95 corridor. Big volume opportunity there and big efficiency gains. We’ve had a number of plants this year that have idled capacity a little bit longer than expected. I think a lot of that has had to do with the uncertainty in the U.S. economy. We’ll cycle that as we go into next year. Industrial development ramps up, and we’ll leverage the performance that we’ve delivered so far this year to drive some nice growth as we get into 2026.

With that, Brian, we’ll be happy to take your questions.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Great, thank you, Sean. I’ll probably go back to some of those slides to refer to them in a little bit, but just maybe focus more on the near term. The network has obviously bounced back pretty well, which I’m going to talk about in more detail. Just relative to where you thought you were tracking for the third quarter from a carload perspective, maybe from a cost perspective, because some of these are actually probably coming back better than certainly we thought, but maybe even yourself. What’s sort of the state of the quarter and how you’re progressing into the end of the year here?

Joe Hinrichs, President and Chief Executive Officer, CSX: Yeah, I can take that one. I think from a market carload perspective, it’s been a little bit mixed. Intermodal’s been off to a solid start of the third quarter. We’re up a little bit, and international, particularly the last month or so, has been doing fairly well. The domestic side has sort of been flat. Domestic intermodal’s been flattish. That being said, the new partnership we just announced with BNSF, we just started moving some new freight a couple of days ago. We’ll have another ramp-up as we get to the beginning of October. You’ll start to see that show up in the weekly numbers here very, very soon. Domestic coal, I mentioned, that continues to be strong, particularly the utility coal side. Steel and industrial, not as much on the domestic side. Exports have been down a little bit, but in line with our expectations.

I would say the segment that’s been off probably the most has been merchandise as a whole, but specifically within merchandise, ag, and food and chemicals, though this month, knock on wood, chemicals has held up a little bit better. We’ll see what that foretells for the fourth quarter. A little bit of negative mix within merchandise as well that you’ll see show up in the revenue per unit this quarter. Nothing dramatic, but on the cost side, you saw very, very good momentum. We had about 550 basis points of sequential margin improvement from Q1 to Q2. When we were struggling operationally in Q1, came out of that in Q2. There’s a little bit of a swing that we get on the cost side. We talked about maybe $20 million of P&O benefits that were unique to the second quarter we won’t see in the third quarter.

Overall, on the cost side, doing very well, continuing to drive efficiency gains, and the network is running well. You’ll see more of the same from Q2 going into Q3. The only thing I’d caveat on the cost side is the restructuring is now complete. We talked about kind of $15 to $20 million of restructuring charges will be within that range. We also have about a $10 million charge we’re going to take because we made the choice to change outsourced tech vendors, and there’s a termination fee of about $10 million related to that. That will drive better efficiency and lower costs on a go-forward basis. It was the right decision for us, but that’ll drive an impact in the quarter.

The other thing I’d point to is with all the things going on that I’m sure we’ll get into here, advisory fees will be part of the expense base in Q3 and Q4, probably $5 to $10 million or so each quarter.

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: The restructuring was more of the corporate office and paper force, not the bigger restructuring we just talked about.

Joe Hinrichs, President and Chief Executive Officer, CSX: Correct.

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Imagine we did a 5% management reduction in our costs in early July, and it affects the third quarter for the restructuring.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: It’s been a while since coal’s been a positive, at least to talk about for a couple of quarters. It seems like it’s always volatile for reasons we all know. Is there something more constructive for domestic as we get to these power generations? Obviously, not aware of any new plants being built. If anything, maybe some of the retirements just get pushed out. Is that something we should be a little bit more optimistic on, or is it maybe not something we want to count too much on?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Two things are driving the domestic coal volume increase lately. One was a hotter summer, and the domestic utility, especially in the South, used more coal. As Sean mentioned, we’re replenishing the piles they used. That’s part of it. There have been some extensions. I think you’ll probably see that utility plants that were scheduled to close have been extended. One more recently, there was a couple of months. We’ll see if it gets it again. That’s because of power needs and also because of the political environment’s change. I think you will see some extensions going into the near future, which could help with that as well. What’s exciting for us, too, is when the Blue Ridge reopens in a few weeks, that’s a normal path for the most efficient path for a lot of that coal to go to the South utilities.

We’re anxious to get that back up and running again. Domestic coal’s been stronger in the quarter than we anticipated, and that likely may happen again in the next quarter if we continue to see some of these extensions.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: The network obviously was in a pretty tough spot for a while. It’s certainly bounced back a lot better than we had thought. As we look at our op dashboard we put out each week, it’s like you guys have been the best of anybody for the last couple of weeks. It’s certainly noticeable, but you’re doing this before these big infrastructure projects are finished, right? What happened to really get that turnaround? I think there was some skepticism that usually rail networks, when they get into challenges like that, take a while to also get out of them.

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that surprised a lot of people was how quickly we were able to rebound. If you look at our numbers operationally, even in the third and fourth quarter, they were very competitive. In February, we started to see a significant decline, and that carried over into March and early April. The team really came together and put some processes in place, but also just regrouped with the reality of what we were dealing with at the time and was able to really overcome that. Importantly, I think it’s another example of why we get a benefit of all the activity we’ve done in investing in our employees and our relationships. If you can get your employees engaged and motivated to be a part of the solution, you can get a much faster recovery, which is what we saw. It’s very sustainable.

These are the same processes that we’ve been running for quite some time. If you go back and look at our data in 2023, we probably had the best year we’ve ever had, and we’re now running at those levels really since May, and hopefully we will continue that. I don’t see a reason why. The exciting thing for us is this is all happening while we have those two north-south routes closed. What that will do when they open back up is make more natural routing of trains and take some of the out-of-route miles and the costs out that Sean mentioned, but it also gives us a lot more resiliency and redundancy if something were to happen somewhere. Really what happened to us last year was just the sequence of things kept getting worse and worse.

Milton and Helene and then some bad winter and then the flooding in the Midwest, and it all kind of kept pushing our problem into the same areas where the weather was hitting us. Now that we have the cars on line down dramatically, we have the dwell times, the velocity where we want them to be, we have a lot more resiliency in our network. I think you could expect to see continued performance around the levels that we’re used to and that we have been performing for the last couple of years.

Joe Hinrichs, President and Chief Executive Officer, CSX: Brian, as we look forward, I think one of the things that’s really exciting is where we’re at from a technology perspective. We’ve got a real-time operations portal which allows Mike and the entire operations team to see where are the trains, what’s running late, how can we catch it up and fix things. The methodologies that we’re using are still good old-fashioned railroading. It’s getting on the phone, calling the terminal managers, adjusting things on the fly. We’re investing in some technologies now that will allow us to model out what’s happening on the railroad to help predict what decisions are going to make the best network-wide impact for us. We’re making some very quick advancements in that. I think by the end of the year, we’ll have some prototypes out there that we’ll be able to start using to help continue to make operational improvements.

In particular, when we see challenges across the network, whether that be weather or whether it be a locomotive that has a stoppage, what decisions do we make in order to maintain the health and fluidity of the network?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Yeah, the human brain cannot simulate all the scenarios that we deal with on a daily basis. You get asked all the time about AI or technology, where does it have the most ripe opportunity in railroading? This is one of them, in decision-making on a real-time basis. You may think you’re making the right decision for Toledo, but that train’s going to go all the way to Jacksonville. How do we optimize all the decision-making that we do? A really exciting time for us. As Sean said, we’ve been making major investments. It’s not just the will to put AI in or to put that kind of learning into place. You have to have the data center. You have to have the data in the right place. We’re getting the data in the cloud, getting all the data organized.

We had a very traditional mainframe data center kind of methodology. We had lots of old systems that weren’t talking to each other. We’re investing in all of that. That’s going to give us tremendous capability going forward. That’ll be a next big step opportunity for us, to be able to make those simulated best decisions in real time across the benefit of the network, not just a local yard.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: How about the technology just in the field? For a while, the industry was not really able to move much of anything forward, whether it was automated inspections, some of the wheel cars, stuff like that. It seemed like it made a lot of sense from a safety and a cost perspective. Is that now on the agenda? It seems like the industry is pushing that a little bit more forward, which makes sense. Is that another possible technology?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: No question. We lost four years of advancement really across this industry when it came to technology during the last administration. They just were not open to anything that might someday possibly affect someone’s job. We really, as an industry, are excited about the partnership we have with the Department of Transportation and the FRA right now on working through how to improve safety. If you look at the major reasons why we have derailments, it’s usually track-related, separation or cracks or whatever, or something around bearings. Both of these technologies, the technology can help significantly, wheels and bearings. Both of these on the track inspection side, in bad weather, all conditions, all the time, automatic track inspections keep working. Our goal is to keep our talented employees working, but have them fixing problems, not finding them. Let technology find those problems much more accurately and efficiently.

That’s the goal that we’re all working on.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: You mentioned labor, obviously, is part of the technology discussion. A little while ago, you’re coming up on what your three-year anniversary. I think one of the more debatable things, at least from the investor community, was moving forward with labor and negotiations maybe a little bit different than in the past. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think we’ve seen just about everybody match that. Was there an advantage from being a first mover? Are you having, like you mentioned, people getting back in the system and helping the network? Is that one thing? Are there other things that we should continue to think of here?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Yeah, I think when it comes to labor negotiations, there’s almost always an advantage for going first. One, the unions are more collaborative and want to find solutions if they have a willing partner. Second of all, you just get the noise and the anxiety out of the system, which can be counterproductive, especially when there’s so much discretionary effort in an industry like ours out in the railroad, in the network. Importantly, there was a lot of work done, though, as an industry going into the negotiations about what the important topics were. There wasn’t a misalignment, I think, from the entire industry perspective. It’s just a willingness to go forward and get things done. I think when you talk to employees, unions, and customers, and even government officials and regulators, all of them have a bad taste in their mouth of what happened last time.

Took almost three years, had twice a threat of strike, had to go to Congress. There’s a lot of anxiety. Took three years in some cases for people to get a raise. They got on their rears, but it just didn’t feel the same. Our employees told us loud and clear they didn’t want to go through that again. It was really important. What was really good about this agreement was it’s been patterned. It’s been consistently across all the other agreements I’ve done nationally. It’s been all the same economics, which is important for all of us collectively and the unions themselves. It also was really important to get behind us so that when we had the issues we had, we could get to our workforce and say, "Hey, we are one CSX. We’re one team.

Let’s go together and work to fix this, get this network back where we’re capable of." You saw how quickly we were able to do that. Lastly, I’ll say that spirit of partnership is really important to make efficiencies. If you’re fighting for years over the economics or other issues related to a national contract, you don’t spend any time working on the local issues because the union will just say, "We’re not working on it until you..." Now we’re working through how do we make each yard more efficient? How do we look through to combine our pools of people? How do we better utilize our really talented employees to be more efficient? We have a lot of that going on, including how do we implement electronic bidding in the north of our network where we didn’t have that before. Now that’s coming forward.

We’re able to move forward on other things that are more CSX specific because we have the national negotiations behind us.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: One of the other areas we’ve seen a lot of partnership, of course, is with the M&A, the TransCon merger that’s been proposed. We’ve seen a number of different announcements. Before we get further into the details, the one question we get and try to think through is, you know, can a partnership, and this is, I guess, what we’re going to see play out real time, but pros and cons of mergers, obviously, there’s quite a bit on either side depending on who you talk to. From your perspective, you know, what do you feel like a non-merged partnership in the spirit of cooperation that we’re seeing in these press releases? Like, can that compete against a potential UPNS merger when you look further down if that’s the steady state of where this all ends?

Of course, there’s a lot happening between now and what that means, but how do you approach it, you know, here and now as you start to launch some of these partnerships?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: The way we were thinking of it all along is, you know, what problem are we trying to solve? Obviously, you want, from a CSX perspective, to get more efficient, to improve your margins, grow volume, profitably grow the volume, those things. From an industry perspective, what problems are we trying to solve? A lot of it has to do with this notion of how do we get back to growth? How do we get back to converting business that should be on rail, that’s on truck today or other modes? What we’re really excited about is that we have an industry now that’s talking about solving those problems, whether it’s the interchanges and the inefficiencies there, or just a spirit of partnership to go and find new solutions or ways to go about this.

For the longest time, the industry was so focused on each railroad’s own piece of the pie, and that pie was getting smaller, but we were all focused on can we marginally get a bigger piece of that pie. The real opportunity here is can we find an opportunity to grow that pie significantly? The largest opportunity that’s been pronounced by a lot of people is just what they call the watershed, which is volume that goes through the interchanges or through the different regions of the different railroads. One of the most exciting things going on right now is the partnerships that we have about trying to go after that business and solve these problems. For the longest time, all of us thought it didn’t make any sense to have the inefficiencies of the interchanges that we have.

We’ve tolerated them and that we’ve kind of, because of our own existence or lots of different reasons. The threat or the concept of a transcontinental railroad has put all of the other railroads in a position where we need to be able to, if that ever comes to fruition, we need to be able to compete. Now everything’s on the table to say, from a, and the problem to be solved is from the customer standpoint, how do you offer the same level of service that one could possibly offer if they’re in control of the entire transcontinental railroad? There’s nothing physically or technically stopping us from solving those problems today. It’s basically, you need willing partners that are willing to go make it happen. I believe we have willing partners now wanting to make that happen, and we’re working on it as we speak.

Because from a technical and a physical standpoint, just how do you not have all that waste at the interchange? You know, the recently announced agreement that we just started this week, the new service with BNSF Railway, that train comes from Phoenix to Birmingham, Alabama. It has BNSF Railway locomotives on it. It’s a complete intermodal train. We just do a crew change in Birmingham, take that train with their BNSF Railway locomotives over to Atlanta, to the Fairburn Terminal, unload all that, then load the boxes back, bring it back, and then give it back to BNSF Railway. It’s not going through Chicago where it went. That volume went through Chicago before and had to be trucked between two different rail yards. How do we now go after every single waste that’s in our system and don’t tolerate it?

It’s going to provide better service for customers, more competition for truck, hopefully more volume for railroads, and get trucks off the roads, but also make those interchanges a lot more efficient. We also then need to rationalize our capacity at these interchanges. How do we make it more efficient that way? We all have so many assets that we’ve grown up with over time. The short answer here is that the three other railroads, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific Kansas City, and BNSF Railway, and CSX Corporation have come together to say, okay, if the STB does approve this Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern transaction, how do we collectively compete with that? What’s it take to do that? We don’t have to wait for an STB approval. We don’t have to spend $2 billion of capital to make that happen. We don’t have to pay a premium.

We don’t have a breakup fee risk. How do we do all this as one team trying to figure out to do that? That is exciting. You know, and are there benefits if you have control of the entire experience? There could be. We have to then offset that by saying, what does it take to compete with that? That’s the work that we’re all working on making happen.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Obviously, there’s more willingness because of the transaction or the announcement of the transaction, however it takes shape. In terms of the practicality of it, maybe you can use Birmingham as an example, like with the haulage rights, which I think a lot of us are still getting up to speed on, how that’s different than trackage rights. Maybe you can get a little bit of detail on how that came to pass, how many more of those can potentially be put in across the network, because I think that’s really what the industry is now evolving into, which was maybe not even discussed before. Is it too early to even tell how much is?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Trackage rights are typically more permanent and actually require STB approvals and things of that nature. Haulage agreements can be reached any time, and they’re not as permanent, and they’re a lot simpler. I know Sean needs to make sure that the economics make sense for all parties, of course. There is so much opportunity if you just have willing partners to find solutions. The objective here is to say, what’s the fastest, most efficient, best route for the customers? How do we make that happen? Corf doesn’t make sense if you’re going to go to Atlanta to go up to Chicago, get stuck in Chicago, and then come back to Atlanta. Where are all the other, and there are lots of them, a lot of those opportunities?

Nothing against Chicago, but there’s a lot of interchange traffic there, and a lot of things happen, and there’s a lack of connectivity that probably we need to fix. The most important thing is just to say, what’s the best, fastest, the best route, the fastest route, and the lowest cost route for everybody involved? How do we do that efficiently and offer that to customers? Some of that may be on UP, and some of that may be on BNSF or CPKC or CN to the east. Our objective at CSX is to have the most efficient, fastest network in the east and to be the preferred partner for customers and for the other railroads who want to work with us. As long as we make that happen, we’re in a good position. That’s what we’re focused on. That’s what’s exciting about this.

Now that we have willing partners, we get to step back and say, this doesn’t make any sense. Why do we do it this way? Not be beholden to the past. That’s the most exciting thing about what’s going on right now, to be able to make that happen. That’s the nature of competition. It forces you to change, adapt, innovate, and we’re starting to see that. To the answer to your question, Brian, there are many opportunities like that to go after. You’ll hear more about that over time. From our standpoint, we need to sequence these things in a way that we can manage them because we’re the beneficiary of a lot of this. We need to make sure that we’re able to manage it in a way that continues to execute well for customers and to perform well for customers.

We’re working hard to make sure that we’re sequencing those things so that we can execute.

Joe Hinrichs, President and Chief Executive Officer, CSX: I’d just add on the economics of haulage, and haulage is just one of the options on the menu for how we solve some of these issues that Joe’s talking about. On haulage specifically, acknowledge, yeah, your revenue per unit on that move is going to be lower than your average within that business segment, but it’s because it’s not our assets, right? It is our track, it is our crew. The margins are attractive, and the returns on assets on those moves are actually quite attractive. It can definitely work as a solution, not the only one, to unlock some of the value that’s out there.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: The one service you just, we were talking about earlier that started, I think, this week, and we’ll see more volume shift over in the next month and into next quarter. Is there a way that we can think about conceptualizing the size of that as an example and what that might look like? I think it’s another train service being put into place. Obviously, it’s converting from a different service over the rail. What should we think about in terms of relative size? Are we going to start to see these be meaningful?

Joe Hinrichs, President and Chief Executive Officer, CSX: Yeah, we will be able to quantify it. We have not quantified it yet, and we are not going to go through and quantify each individual opportunity. What I will say is you are going to see it start to show up in the weekly numbers, and you will get a very good sense of the magnitude of the opportunity. Not all of them will be discernible in the weekly volumes, but this particular partnership with BNSF will be.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: The other one that’s interesting, Joe, I think, is the CN one that also came out to Memphis to Nashville, which I think is, at least from my perspective, kind of emblematic of how maybe the perception of the industry and how they’re working together is changing. Can you give us a little bit more background about that?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Yeah, so all three of those railroads are working with us right now. We’re spending time with our operations and our commercial teams, and everyone’s just getting at the table saying, what’s the flow of traffic and where can we find opportunity to work together and how can we demonstrate this efficiency across the interchanges and whatnot? What came up was CN has a lot of volume that moves from Prince Rupert to Memphis that wants to get to Nashville, but it stops in Memphis because that’s where their business ends. We said, well, you know, we have a train running every day from Memphis to Nashville that’s not full.

We could just take it to Nashville and offer that service and take trucks off the road and offer a better service as long as we do that seamlessly and we share an intermodal terminal or, you know, we kind of cross a lot of work together there with CN in Memphis. That was what we announced. That’s truck conversion. It’s incremental margin for us. It’s a better service experience collectively for the customer. It’s a win for everybody. In the past, the railroads were always looking to make sure if they did anything, it was 50% had to benefit you. What’s going on right now is we’re all looking for all the opportunities to serve customers better and to demonstrate that we can work better together to grow the whole pie.

There may be an example where this more benefits CSX, and we’re working on other examples that will benefit CN or CPKC or BNSF. A lot of the traffic flows from west to east. In the near term, you’re going to see a lot more of the volume in the east, but over time, if we can work on this interchange and this watershed, it benefits everyone. That’s all the work that’s going on, and that’s the difference that’s happening right now. We couldn’t get railroads to kind of just work on growing the whole pie because it was always about, well, make sure I get the biggest benefit. Now we’re working together collectively to say, let’s just make it all better for customers, for the economy, and for society, and demonstrate we can do this through these partnerships.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: What’s sort of the feedback from shippers and customers now that seems like it’s almost a graver world in some ways from a railroad perspective? Obviously, things are still changing. There’s a lot of uncertainty, but we’ve seen several headlines, filings, shippers voicing their concerns, some big ones, against potential merger and what that might mean for them. Is that an opportunity? Are they trusting of putting more freight on the rail networks, or does it still need to show us the service, the reliability?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: At the highest level, I think the service improvements across the entire industry have been pretty meaningful the last couple of years, especially compared to coming out of COVID. That’s good for all of us. Certainly, we think we’ve been leading the way over the last several years in that regard. I think in general, the customers want more business on rail. It’s safer, it’s better for the economy, it’s better for the environment, and in most cases, it should be lower cost. What they’ve always been looking for is more repeatability, reliability, dependability of the service levels, and also a partnership that is more conducive of how a customer relationship should be. We’ve been working hard on that. I think you’ll see that changing in the industry. I think that will be a good thing.

I won’t speak for all the different associations and groups that have come out regarding the proposed consolidation, but I think that what you’re seeing is customers are preferring, many of them preferring this partnership agreement because it still allows for a lot of the basic tenets of the existing network to be there, but also us working on the inefficiencies that are impacting customers. We’ve seen a very positive response from customers so far on what we’ve been announcing and what we’ve been working on with all the other railroads.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: In terms of new interchange points, which I guess would be another aspect to the whole network dynamics, the shifting, you can do partnerships, you can do haulage rights, but actually creating new interchanges, we saw one with CPKC and yourselves in Morrow Wood, which took a little bit of time to get put into place. Are there ready-made ones for that? Is this part of?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Yeah, I think this is, again, this is the rethinking that’s going on, just get the maps out and say, what’s the best route and can we make it happen? If you get out of thinking the way to always, the paradigm of how we always do it, we should be able to avoid Chicago more than we do. Nothing against Chicago personally, but, traffic flow-wise, we should be able to, if we’re not establishing new interchange points, are we establishing new crew change points, and how do we do that, whether it’s haulage or whether kind of agreements like that? It’s all about getting the traffic across the interchanges efficiently, again, efficiently so that we can compete with someone who might be able to do that on their own. That rethinking is really critical right now because you don’t have to go there necessarily.

It might not be the most efficient route, but we always did it that way because it was the easiest or more natural. Importantly, for us especially, if we can get some meaningful more volume, this is largely, a lot of this is intermodal, okay? Not exclusively, but a lot of this is intermodal. If we can get a lot more intermodal volume, which I think will come CSX way, that density provides new solution opportunities. It wouldn’t make sense if you had a 5,000-foot intermodal train to go around Chicago because you want to combine it to make a 10,000-plus-foot train. If you have enough volume that wants to go around Chicago, you can make that train go around Chicago so you don’t need to go to Chicago. A lot of this is a lot of give and take between where the volume flows are going to go.

Certainly, we’re excited about the partnership opportunities that are being presented to us that will bring more volume opportunity to CSX, which then will create the opportunity for new solutions. A lot of these things go together. We create density, we can create new solutions. That’s the work that’s going on with all the other parties right now.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: When you think about working with the other parties, what’s the speed to market to service? Part of the idea of the strategy with not doing the mergers, you can do it quicker. The industry is not typically known for innovation or speed historically. As we’re talking about on stage here, a lot of things are changing. Will this be a gradual process? Will it take some proof of concepts to really get more support behind it? Obviously, there’s probably some capital involved, maybe some rationalization. I know we’re in still early innings, but do you feel like this momentum is going to build, or are we going to have to see this a little bit, you know, slower steps?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Yeah, I believe the momentum will build. I think it’ll be cadenced, because again, we need it to be, can’t be disrupted to the system because it needs to be managed. I think it will build. I know it’s going to build because of the stuff we’re working on. The more structural changes will take some more time if those are what we decide to do. As far as service offerings and rerouting and all of that, that can happen pretty quickly and is happening pretty quickly. The Canadian National stuff we announced, we made the decision and announced it within like a couple of weeks, and then it’s happening. Literally, that’s how fast. The BNSF Railway stuff was in the works for many months, many months ago. Once we kind of collectively made the decision, it didn’t take that long to execute.

I think you’ll see a lot, especially with intermodal, you see a lot of that. On the carload side, contracts come up, we’ll work around that. Those routes are pretty well established. I’m encouraged by what we’re going to see. There may be new solutions that we haven’t thought of yet, technology, or otherwise that may take a little more time. The good news is that right now the spirit is, let’s not assume anything has to be the way it is today. Everything’s on the table. What’s the art of the possible? What’s it take to create a seamless experience for the customer? That’s the mindset that all the railroads have right now.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Yesterday we saw the preliminary proxy come out. Several hundred pages will have several thousand pages in the filing when that comes out later, your application rather for UPNS. Does that really, you need to find anything new or exciting in there, or does that really change the course of the strategy? Obviously, there’s still a lot of moving pieces, so I’m assuming something would change. Do you kind of already know?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: I haven’t read it yet. I’ve been busy, but I’m going to try and read it on the plane right back to the U.S. later today. There weren’t any surprises. At least our team that’s gone through it didn’t see really any surprises. We’re all waiting for the application to the STB. I think that’s the real meaningful data for information. What’s being proposed, you know, what are the scenarios? What are the conditions or whatever words you want to use? We’re waiting for that. Obviously, that’s pretty important for us to see before we have really a strong opinion one way or another on certain things. In the meantime, as Sean mentioned, we have a number of resources in place working on our thoughts around the proposed consolidation, our thinking around, you know, competitiveness and different locations and things. We want to be prepared for the STB process.

We’re spending a decent amount of money with advisors and lawyers and whatnot going through everything to make sure that we’re prepared. Obviously, this is important for all of us. We didn’t see anything in that that was anything that was surprising to us. Again, the real important document is the application itself so we can really see what they’re proposing in detail. Then we can take a look at what that means for CSX and for the industry. Then what will we propose as solutions to some of those things?

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: There’s some misconception that you compete with the Western railroads and actually partners. You do a lot of interchange work. In this case, maybe the idea is that one of them buys your competitor in the east. Does that, are you worried about foreclosing opportunities? Obviously, the review process is going to look at that pretty extensively. You have a big chemical franchise. UP has a big chemical franchise. There’s, I guess, reasons why the market thought that would be a natural pairing. If that’s not the case, is there certain end markets or areas that are more at risk if you were looking at that versus the status quo?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: I like to say that, first of all, we do have a very strong interchange business with Union Pacific. I anticipate we’ll still have a strong interchange business with Union Pacific no matter how the STB rules, because the customers vote on the routes and the partners. There’s a reason why we have significant interchange business with Union Pacific today, chemical franchise being one of them, autos being another. It’s because the customer votes for CSX and, in this case, UP, for the route, for the offering, for the service. I would anticipate that will still be the case for certain scenarios in the future. As long as CSX continues to be the best running railroad in the east, we’ll have lots of options with customers who want to do business with us.

I’m pretty confident the STB will be looking at this very carefully to make sure the customers still have options in the east no matter what scenario plays out. Some of those franchises are really important to us. They’re important to CSX. The nature of competition will bring new solutions, presumably on all sides. We want to be a part of that or be able to compete with that. We’re confident that our ability to serve our customers, our current route system, our current relationships, and current service levels are all going to help us with customers who will eventually decide where the traffic flows. We lose sight of the fact that the customers are the ones that decide which partners they pick to move their goods. We offer them solutions, they pick a choice. The key is to be able to offer them competitive solutions.

I’m confident that one of those competitive solutions will still maintain the ability for Union Pacific and CSX to move freight together. That will have to play itself out as it plays out. I’m sure the STB will be looking very closely into that. That will be a large ask. We know because they’ve talked to us about it by all the customer groups, to maintain that ability to choose which route is best for the customer.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Right. There’s no single, I mean, the perception is a single line, back to the concept of control, that a single line service can, you know, beat everything. Therefore, you’re potentially not the most competitive in the eastern U.S., but then pair that against what the shippers want, what they’re asking for from a balanced perspective. I think that’s.

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: It is our job and our partnership with the other railroads to be able to offer a competitive solution that does not disadvantage us or another railroad in that interchange or that business. Again, we are talking about right now 25% to 30% of our revenue comes from interchange. You know, 75% to 70% of our revenue today is within our region. That is not going to change. We are talking about the piece that should grow that interchanges, that goes across the interchanges. It is our collective jobs to offer a solution to the customer that competes if there is a combined entity, both in terms of operational effectiveness and routes and timing and speed and cost, but also in terms of the experience.

We have to find a solution that makes it seamless for the customers to deal with two railroads if they are going to have an option of dealing with one. That is technically feasible. It is an interface, but we have to find those solutions. That is the stuff we are all working on together to be able to offer to customers.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Technology, one bill, those types of things.

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Part of that’s the STB process itself by billing. That’ll be part of the conversation if they do, and if the STB does move forward with allowing this consolidation, how do you allow the other railroads to compete on pricing and offerings as well? That will be part of the conversation. It’s our responsibility to offer the customers something that’s competitive, and we will, that’s our commitment to do so.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Maybe we can finish up with going back to the watershed, which I think before this year a lot of us hadn’t really focused on that, and the industry hadn’t really focused on it as well. Reasons why you think that wasn’t the case, I mean, clearly there’s more emphasis on it, maybe more excitement about it. Was this just harder to do, margin dilutive, like if customers were asking for it, I thought the railroad industry might have already progressed down this path. You know, what’s really changed, and I guess how quickly can that market be addressed?

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: This has always been interesting to CSX. As a matter of fact, Sean and the team before I got there had a consultant doing a full analysis of this four years ago or something like that. We already have a lot of that data. We refreshed it lately. It was hard to do, and you need willing partners on both sides. A lot of this has to do with the interchanges. If you weren’t in for fixing the interchanges, then you really couldn’t compete for that watershed. Now we have motivated partners to do that. I think the moment’s right. You got to take advantage of it. The devil’s in the details. It’s by lane, by customer, and we’re all going through that. If you have motivated railroads to find solutions, I believe we’ll find those solutions.

That’ll be good for the industry collectively, for everyone, and it’ll be good for customers and for the society as well. That’s an exciting time for us, and that’s one of the big opportunities we’re all working on.

Brian Austin Beck, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: It certainly is an exciting time for the industry and also for CSX. Thanks for making time to come to London.

Sean Pelkey, CFO, CSX: Thank you for having us, Brian. Appreciate it. Thank you all for being here. Thank you.

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