Joseph R. Hinrichs
President and Chief Executive Officer at CSX
Thanks, Brandon. Yeah, I mean, I think what you've heard from including other transports is that, you know, while the GDP's been growing, the industrial of the economy has been flat or down for the last couple of years, which you know, more closely aligns with certainly the merchandise side of our business. So the interest rate sensitive parts, automotive is still well below, you know, pre pandemic levels, housing market and steel, other things like that, you know. So we're obviously looking forward to hopefully, whether it be interest rates coming down or other policy changes that will help the industrial side of the economy. And maybe we'll see a little bit of growth this year for the first time in a couple of years. So certainly that will impact us, I think, at a higher level. You know, the Howard Street Tunnel project is one most important projects in this company. And as Mike highlighted in his commentary, we've been waiting for a long time to do this and we had a plan that was going to be a three year plan that we've now accelerated into one year, which is going to be done in the 2025 calendar year. That of course means 2025 will have a lot more expenses tied to it for the rerouting costs and taking care of our customers while we do that. But we get the benefits much sooner than originally planned, which helps in 26 and 27. And those benefits include the ability for us to run double stack all the way up and down the east coast, including, you know, places from Chicago. There are trains we can't take right now from Chicago double stack to the east coast because we can't get through the Howard Street Tunnel and some bridges around that area. So you can go all the way, all the way out to our interchange with our western rails and talk about the advantages that will help us. It's one of the probably, if not the largest competitive disadvantage we have right now on our modal business has been the inability to double stack and be able to reach the high population density sectors of the east coast because of that. So this is a big deal. I mean actually if you step back between the MBR interchange that's now open, which was one of the other competitive disadvantages we had on intermodal and other parts of our franchise, and now the Howard Street Tunnel we're going to take care of probably the two biggest competitive disadvantages we had in our network by the end of 2025. So we're really excited about, about, about that. And that's a big deal because right now we have to double stack. We have to re. We have to route basically up through upstate New York and down. So you can imagine all the weather in the winter doing that. But also the outer route miles are tremendous. And so, and frankly we can't run up and down that I95 corridor with double stack right now. So a big deal to us. We're looking forward to those benefits. And so, yes, that will contribute to more meaningful, you know, ability to grow profits in 26 and 27, along with other things that are going on, including industrial development, including the efficiency actions we're taking across the network and including all the work that we're doing with our customers. So we continue to be very excited about the potential of this business and support the targets and the stuff that we outlined at our investor day in November. And though that if you can do the math now and say, okay, as Sean highlighted, 25 is going to be lower end of that, that means we're still very strongly believe in our plan that 26 and 27 will be more supportive of making that happen. Thanks.
