Brian Ossenbeck: Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Just quick follow-up for Paul. If you can just give us some sense in terms of how much of those productivity metrics you’re talking about are actually independent of volume? I’m sure that would help. But how much do you have line of sight if volume stays flat or maybe doesn’t recover in the back half? And then just to ask more broadly, do you think there’s a structural margin gap that will always be here for this network versus some of your peers? You do have roughly 10 percentage points more intermodal. It’s more truck competitive. You can have shorter length of haul dynamics with international as well, lighter weight, more touches. So, I’d just be curious to hear if that’s something you think about in the long term in terms of closing that gap, that might be a hindrance or if there’s something I’m not thinking about from a productivity density perspective, that could make that an incorrect assumption.
Thank you.
Alan Shaw: Brian, each franchise has unique strengths. We have committed to top-tier revenue and top-tier earnings growth, coupled with industry-competitive margins. We’re going to deliver that. We’ve got a franchise that faces the fastest growing segments of the U.S. economy and a franchise that’s poised for growth. We’re entering the third year of a freight recession. That will unwind. And when it does, the enhancements that we’ve made to safety, the enhancements that we’ve made to service, the ability to attract business in the fourth quarter, and automotive and intermodal, which are our most service-sensitive markets, right, give us a pathway to success going forward and allow us to unlock our full potential. And Paul and his team and entire executive team are intently focused on driving out cost inefficiencies and driving productivity.
Mark George: Let me just add real quick. This entire team recognizes that a margin gap exists today between where we are and where we should be, and we’re focused intently on closing and narrowing that gap before we get to an area of talking about why any remaining gap exists. There’s a lot of runway still for us organically and self help.
Paul Duncan: Yeah. The specific around how much is initiatives versus volume adjust, many of those initiatives that I spoke to are going to continue regardless of the volume environment. The iterations to the plan are always going to continue, but that is going to be the lever that is most sensitive to volume. But we’re going to continue to drive train life. We’re going to continue to drive crew productivity regardless of the volume environment.
Brian Ossenbeck: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brandon Oglenski with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.
Brandon Oglenski: Hey, good morning, everyone, and thanks for taking my question. And I guess maybe the frustration from the investor side is that if we go back a couple of analyst meetings, maybe even back to 2015, the mantra here has always been that we’re trying to close the gap. But I guess constructively, Paul or Ed, can you help us understand where you are in trip plan compliance with your customers? Because I think ultimately, it’s consistency of service that matters, right? So, what can you talk about what did you learn through changing the make-up rules through 2023? And where is the future on service to your customers? What are you seeing today?
Paul Duncan: Well, let me start off, and I’d love to have Ed jump in here as well. From an intermodal perspective, as we look at where we finished fourth quarter, we delivered the best intermodal service we have put across this railroad in several years, and customers rewarded us with volume as a result. We expect to maintain that level of service based on what we’ve heard from our customers is their expectation. From a merchandise standpoint, we continue to see improvements in merchandise trip plan compliance throughout the year. To your point around the train makeup rules, we said that we were going to recover after we had moved forward with those, meant to again drive greater safety and resiliency across our network. We feel very confident that we’ve seen — merchandise trip line compliance continue to come up throughout the year, and we feel that we’re very confident as we look at 2024 based on the further discipline that we are going to build and drive inside of our merchandise network.
Ed Elkins: I’d offer a couple of proof points just to think about that are recent. The first one is we had one of our very largest customers comment to us that come emerging from the weather events that just happened in the past year — or, excuse me, in the past week, that we recovered better than just about anybody else. And we really take that to heart because they themselves are a broad survey of many other railroads. So, we think that that’s really important as a proof point for resilience. As we return back to plan faster and faster after inevitable events, that’s going to define a large part of the value that we’re offering customers.
Brandon Oglenski: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Justin Long with Stephens Inc. Please proceed with your question.
Justin Long: Thanks, and good morning. So, for 2024, there are a lot of moving pieces that you’ve talked about. But when you put it all together, do you think you’ll be within that targeted longer-term range of 100 basis points to 150 basis points of annual improvement in the OR? And, Mark, I think you and Alan both mentioned the interest expense headwind you’ll have this year. I was wondering if you could help quantify that year-over-year headwind.
Mark George: Yeah. Thanks, Justin. Let’s be explicit with interest. We ended 2023 with about $17.2 billion of outstanding debt. The effective interest rate is about 4.7%. So, I would model about $210 million a quarter for interest expense on the go forward. We’ve essentially kind of pre-funded that CSR acquisition, so that should be relatively steady within a couple of few million dollars per quarter of that. And as we look at the moving pieces, again, we’ve got some headwinds here in the first half. I think as volume starts to grow as we go from Q2 to Q3 and then into Q4, we should really start to see, with the compares, a pretty good improvement year-over-year. So, I don’t see so much in the first quarter certainly. I think there’s a risk of regression there.
