Status of the Railroad - A Message from Kenny Rocker, EVP, Marketing & Sales
Announcement Number: CN2024-6
Categories: General Announcements
Posted Date: February 21, 2024
To Our Customers,
As we round out February, I’m encouraged with the team’s progress to get our overall service performance back to pre-holiday levels. While there are pockets on our network that are facing some challenges from recent storms and interchange connections, we continue to stay engaged with our supply chain partners to resolve issues as quickly as possible and deliver an improved service product to you. In terms of resources, we continue to be in a good position. We have a good locomotive supply to meet available demand, and our hiring plan for train crews remains solid.
Here is a quick look at the most recent key operating metrics, which are holding steady over the past three weeks:
- AAR weekly carloadings at 155,879.
- Car velocity steady at 203.
- Car dwell is flat at 23.3 hours.
- AAR train speed holding at 23.8 mph.
Listening to Your Feedback for Service Performance Measures
Union Pacific is focused on delivering a quality and consistent service product to you. We are constantly listening to gain a better understanding of what is most important to you. After interviewing more than 100 customers, we uncovered some common themes:
- For our manifest and intermodal customers, many of you rely on our historical performance to inform your rail transportation planning decisions, but we didn’t have a measure that reflected this practice.
- For our unit train customers, you weren’t seeing yourselves in the monthly data we were reporting and wanted a measure more reflective of your transportation experiences with Union Pacific.
With this feedback in mind, we worked to address those two key themes and designed a new measure called the Service Performance Index (SPI).
- For manifest and intermodal, the Service Performance Index will help you compare the service you are receiving today with the best monthly network performance over the last three years. We’ll reach for that historical best benchmark and endeavor to out-perform that level of performance.
- For our bulk (unit train) business, we will measure how well our bulk trains are achieving their demand and cycle time plans on a monthly basis. This allows us to provide a key service measure to a group of customers that didn’t have a measure before.
Service Performance Index, in addition to our other key service metrics, will keep us in a continuous improvement mindset as we work with you to drive shared success and growth. If you have any questions, please contact your sales representative.
Thank You
We truly appreciate your business and will continue to work together with you and other supply chain partners to provide a safe, reliable service product to help you compete in the marketplace.
Sincerely,
Kenny Rocker
Executive Vice President, Marketing & Sales