Trains.com Staff
6 min read
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CSX has fully bounced back from a bout of operational challenges that began with hurricanes last fall and worsened after the Feb. 1 closure of the Howard Street Tunnel in Baltimore, CEO Joe Hinrichs tells Trains.
The railroad’s on-time performance in May, measured by trip plan compliance for intermodal and carload shipments, has returned to December levels.
“I’ve learned enough from Mother Nature to never call the all clear. But we feel really good about the state of our railroad right now,” Hinrichs said in an interview on Wednesday. “The yards are in good shape. The network is performing back to where it was in ’23. And so the team’s done a great job … quickly getting the network back.”
CSX (NASDAQ: CSX) was already struggling operationally when it shut down the Howard Street Tunnel for a six-to-eight-month double-stack clearance project. This forced the railroad to detour more than 16 trains per day. The tunnel is a key link in both the north-south Interstate 95 Corridor and the east-west corridor that connects Baltimore with the Midwest and with coal mines in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
By the first week in April, the CSX network had slowed to levels not seen since the 2022 service crisis caused by widespread crew shortages at all four big U.S. railroads.
The latest performance metrics, released Wednesday, tell the story of how CSX turned its operations around over the past seven weeks:
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Terminal dwell has improved 20.2% compared to the worst week this year.
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Average train velocity is running 15.4% above the lowest level posted this year.
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The number of cars online, a key indication of congestion, has decreased 11.7% compared with this year’s high point.
And CSX is running faster than last year at this time, too. Last week’s dwell was 5.9% lower than the same week last year, while velocity was 3.4% higher.
As a result, combined trip plan compliance for intermodal and carload traffic stood at 82.5% in May – up from 68.1% in early April and in line with December 2024’s 82.7%.
The number of cars online is currently 0.7% higher than a year ago. But that figure reflects extended transit times related to detouring traffic around the Howard Street Tunnel and the out-of-service Blue Ridge Subdivision, which has been closed since September due to extensive damage from Hurricane Helene.
The recovery came faster than initially expected. Executives had said service improvements wouldn’t come overnight and that the Howard Street and Blue Ridge Sub detours would continue to weigh on the railroad until the projects are completed in the fall.
