Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE:NSC) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark R. George: Actually, I’ll handle the headcount question before John talks to you a little bit about his assessment of the challenges. You may recall, we guided last time where we said that overall headcount would likely be flat over the course of the year. Where we were taking 300 non-agreement people out, but we would likely have to add some agreement folks that would offset it. We actually see now with John in the room here a pathway for total headcount to be down around 2% by the time we end the year. So, that’s the patent on headcount. John?

John F. Orr: Yes. And, just to add emphasis to that, as we get more productivity out of our yard and locals and more accuracy on our over the road transits and performance. We’ll see more people virtually come live and we would be able to have more availability and more crew flexibility. And, I have frozen all hiring from operations. There may be two or two critical paths like CNS where signals and communications, that’s a very specialized skill that we will need to continue to evolve as we bring our OT and IT and that kind of perspective into more into our safety plans. But, I would also say that it gets back to the basics. I’m not going to really be too critical of what I inherited, rather I saw a lot of things in flight that I’m able to leverage very quickly on.

And, at the same time, the basics of railroading, the basics of giving a great service plan at the lowest cost in the safest way possible is the recipe and building out discipline around that, creating visibility, accountability and driving purpose, so that we improve these things is part of the challenge that I’ve laid out. And, that’s how we’re delivering short-term and mid-term. And, that’s what we’re going to continue to do.

Operator: Thank you. At this time, we’ve reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I’ll turn the call back over to Luke Nichols for closing comments.

Luke Nichols: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate everyone’s time and joining our call this morning. Recognize there’s a few folks that didn’t get a chance to ask your questions. Wanted to let you know Investor Relations is here through the rest of the day. Please feel free to reach out to us. We’ll look forward to seeing everybody through the quarter.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.