Compared to a year ago, CSX’s on-time originations fell 2 points, to 83 percent, while on-time arrivals dropped 2 points, to 59 percent for the quarter, the railroad reported on July 17 as part of its quarterly earnings release.
CSX needs to improve both measures, CEO Jim Foote says, although well over 90 percent of trains depart within two hours of their scheduled times.
“We don’t get them across the network as effectively as we should,” Foote told investors and analysts during the railroad’s earnings call.
“That’s unacceptable,” he says.
CSX has rolled out trip plans that schedule and monitor every carload and intermodal container in real time. The plans will help the railroad identify service failures and ultimately prevent them, Foote says.
Compliance with the trip plans currently stands in the 60-percent range but needs to be 100 percent, Foote says.
Ultimately, Foote wants CSX people to recognize when there’s a service failure, such as a car that missed a scheduled connection, then go above and beyond the call of duty to get the car onto the next train.
Making this happen will require a cultural change at CSX, Foote says.
Providing more reliable service is critical to CSX’s business strategy. Foote says the railroad aims to differentiate its service product, which will then allow it to charge higher rates and gain volume.
For the quarter, CSX trains moved faster, as speed edged up 15 percent to 17.4 mph, and cars spent less time in yards as terminal dwell improved by 10 percent, to 9.7 hours using CSX measurements that differ from the Association of American Railroads standard.
Average train length also increased 13 percent compared to a year ago.
“Moving all three of these metrics at the same time is no easy task,” Foote says, noting that there’s still plenty room for improvement.
Wall Street analysts on yesterday’s earnings call did not ask CSX executives about the pending reopening of the hump at Radnor Yard in Nashville. The hump was idled last year as former CEO E. Hunter Harrison, who died in December, converted eight of the railroad’s dozen hump yards to flat-switching facilities.
CSX has said that reducing car handlings en route by bypassing hump yards cuts transit time and makes service more reliable.
But not all merchandise shippers have seen improvements under the new operating plan, which continues to undergo refinements.
A shipper tells Trains News Wire that transit times are generally longer now than they were before Harrison arrived at the railroad in March 2016. While transit time has declined in a couple of origin-destination pairs, the shipper says most shipments are taking a day or two longer.
Recent changes to the routings for cars bound for a receiver in Alabama have added three to four days to the previous transit time of 10 days, the shipper says. The reason? Eastbound cars that used to move directly to the destination now are routed to the hump yard at Waycross, Ga., then move west back to Alabama.
