Status of the Railroad - A Message from Kenny Rocker, EVP, Marketing & Sales

Announcement Number: CN2022-62
Categories: General Announcements
Posted Date: October 27, 2022

To Our Customers,

Over the past month, I had the opportunity to travel more and see our customers face-to-face. It was fabulous to visit with customers at the PNWARS and SWARS conferences, as well as meeting with our international customers during my recent trip to Asia. Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with our short line and port partners in Omaha and appreciate the role they play to extend our network reach for our customers.

Since it’s been a few weeks since my last letter, I want to provide an update on our service progress. Overall network performance steadily improved in the third quarter, and while we have seen positive momentum, pockets of our manifest and unit train networks are still challenged. Congestion across the entire supply chain continues to exist, which is pressuring our intermodal service product, especially at some of our inland intermodal terminals. However, our Commercial and Operating teams continue to work together to improve the service product for you.

We continue to make progress on our crew resources, but still have room to improve them. To date, we have graduated 890 employees and have an additional 518 currently in training — all expected to graduate by January 2023. And while hiring continues to be challenged on the northern portion of the network, we will continue to utilize borrow outs to support demand. Currently, we have ~240 borrow outs trained and in service.

Our Metrics
Here are our latest weekly metrics reported to the Surface Transportation Board (STB) on October 21. These metrics are compared to performance in mid-April and are based on the STB definitions for industry reporting:

  • Car Velocity: Improved 12% to 197 miles per day.
  • First Mile, Last Mile: Improved 1 point to 91%.
  • Trip Plan Compliance (TPC):
    • TPC Bulk: Improved 10 points to 76%
    • TPC Manifest: Improved 12 points to 71%
    • TPC Intermodal: Degraded 1 points to 72%
  • Operating Inventory: Decreased by 5% to 191,094 cars. This reflects active inventory minus cars placed at customers’ facilities.

Our Operating team continues to assess the network and adjust our resources to support customer demand while maintaining fluidity.

State-of-the-Art Grain Transload Terminal Open in Chicago
I’m excited that our new grain transload facility at our Global 4 intermodal terminal is operational for our Midwest agricultural producers to utilize this harvest season. We are loading soybeans and dried distiller grains (DDGs) into marine containers to travel by rail to the West Coast ports for export. This new facility offers greater access to containers for exporters and faster container turnaround times for ocean carriers — a win-win solution for both our agricultural and ocean carrier customers.

Thank You
As always, thank you for your business. We remain committed to improving our service to the levels that you expect. We appreciate your collaborative efforts to work with us to ease the supply chain congestion together.

Sincerely,

Original | Kenny Rocker Signature

Kenny Rocker
Executive Vice President, Marketing & Sales