Status of the Railroad - A Message from Kenny Rocker, EVP, Marketing & Sales
Announcement Number: CN2023-13
Categories: General Announcements
Posted Date: February 28, 2023
To Our Customers,
First of all, I wanted to comment on our recent announcement regarding Chairman Lance Fritz’s retirement plans. The Board of Directors and Lance have been actively discussing this for some time. We have a thoughtful and robust succession planning process and we’re committed to ensuring a seamless process for all our stakeholders. Until a successor is named, business will continue as usual. We remain focused on safely serving our customers, employees and communities.
Network Update
As February comes to a close, I wanted to share an update on our operations. Severe winter weather impacted our network throughout the month. We had back-to-back storms bringing artic temperatures, heavy snowfall and blizzard conditions to our Northern Region that led to significant ice and road closures – impacting crew transportation. And at the same time, ice, strong winds and heavy rainstorms impacted operations in Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. Combined, these weather events slowed our performance as trains were delayed which subsequently disrupted our scheduled flow of resources.
Our team has responded quickly to these challenges to mitigate the impacts to our operations. We have protocols in place and resources staged in affected areas to support and restore operations as safely and quickly as possible. In addition, we continue to make progress building our crew base as our hiring pipeline is significantly stronger than it was a year ago. Our hiring efforts over the past year have also allowed us to recover quicker from these severe weather events. Year to date, we have graduated close to 170 crew employees, bringing the total to more than 1,200 since May 2022, and currently have more than 690 employees in training. We are utilizing approximately 250 borrow-outs to support customer demand in areas of the network with hiring challenges.
Our Metrics
Here are our latest weekly metrics reported to the Surface Transportation Board (STB) on February 24. These metrics are compared to performance in mid-April 2022, and are based on the STB definitions for industry reporting:
- Car Velocity: Improved 10% to 194 miles per day.
- First Mile, Last Mile: Improved 2 points to 92%.
- Trip Plan Compliance (TPC):
- TPC Bulk (unit train): Improved 8 points to 74%.
- TPC Manifest: Improved 10 points to 69%.
- TPC Intermodal: Improved 2 points to 75%.
Commitment to Safe Transportation of Your Goods
Safety is our top priority. While it’s an important part of fulfilling our transportation obligations, it is also about keeping all of us out of harm’s way: our customers, our employees, and our communities.
When it comes to hazardous materials, Union Pacific has well-established practices and protocols in place to handle them securely and keep people safe.
- We have a dedicated Hazardous Materials Management team that takes a four-prong approach to its mission: Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Recovery.
- All Union Pacific employees are trained on hazardous materials safety.
- We hold annual drills to make sure our emergency response plans remain effective and are followed by all employees.
- We work with community emergency response teams to implement and share best practices and jointly educate our team members.
- Union Pacific is a charter member of TRANSCAER, a voluntary national outreach initiative focused on helping communities prepare for and respond to possible hazardous material incidents.
- 99.9% of all hazardous material shipments by rail reach their destination without incident; however, should an incident occur, Union Pacific has a 24/7 emergency response center to manage the situation.
- If a tank car is damaged and cannot travel safely on rail, we have the equipment necessary to transfer the contents to an intact tank car and remove the hazardous materials from the site so remediation can begin.
In addition to these protocols, we also participate in the American Chemistry Council’s (ACC) Responsible Care Management System (RCMS) certification process. Following an independent, third-party audit of our current programs, policies and practices related to chemicals shipments, Union Pacific was recently recertified for leveraging industry-best safety practices.
For further details regarding our safety practices for transporting hazardous materials, read this Insights article by Connie Roseberry, AVP and Chief Safety Officer at Union Pacific.
Continuing to Invest for Growth
Our focus on making capital investments to strengthen the railroad and support growth has not changed. Last year, we spent $3.4 billion in capital – of which $600 million was directed towards increasing capacity and supporting commercial facilities. This year we are planning to increase our capital investment and spend around $3.6 billion, with another $600 million targeted for supporting customer growth. We are investing in sidings projects, expanding our intermodal facilities, and track projects supporting growth in our carload business.
Thank You
We appreciate your patience and support as we continue to make progress increasing the fluidity of our network and adjusting our resources to meet more customer demand. We remain confident that we are on the path to providing you with an improved service product that meets your needs. As always, thank you for your business.
Kenny Rocker
Executive Vice President, Marketing & Sales