Good morning, everyone. Good morning. As CSX is grounded in safety, I'm going to first give a quick safety briefing. If, for any reason, we need to evacuate this space, please first be conscientious of your safety buddy. That's the person to your right. For those in the end of the aisle, that is the person to your left. In the case of an evacuation, we will go through the same doors that we entered. We will cross through the breakfast area, and we'll convene there in the green lawn across the way. We do have the CSX Police Department here, who are able to assist in case of any kind of medical or other emergency. Second, you'll note that in our presentation, we contain both a disclosure on forward-looking statements and on Non-GAAP. Please review as you can.
And then finally, I'd ask you to all please check your phones and electronic devices to make sure that they are either switched off or silenced. With that, I'm very, very proud to welcome our President and CEO, Joe Hinrichs.
All right. Thank you, Matthew. And good morning, everyone. I'll be brief. I want to take you through the agenda today and also get started. Just a reminder, you know, we're going to tell our story today, and a lot of people are going to help tell it for us, both here in the conference room or in this center here and also on the train. So for those of you going to be joining us on the train, you're going to have a pretty fun, exciting ride. We are going to share some content with you on the train. So that's the forward-looking disclosure. Hopefully, you read it all on the Non-GAAP. And that's the Non-GAAP. And here's today's agenda. And so it's in your books. By the way, Sean's presentation is not in there yet, so don't start looking.
We'll give that to you when he starts to present because you'll be distracted, and we have some exciting things to talk to you about. First, Kevin and the marketing and sales team are going to talk about what we're doing, our strategies for industrial development, and of course, all the customer engagement. I hope you enjoyed last night. You know, we both had Peter and Chris talk about their experiences with CSX as customers, then we had Didi and Lee talk about their experience with CSX as a partner on industrial development, all key components of what we're doing here, and we'll also talk more about that on the customer service side on the train ride. Kevin will wrap that up. We'll take a break after that, and then we'll come back in.
Mike and Casey are going to talk about our operations, a really important part of our business, of course, the opportunity we see, the capacity we're unleashing, and the opportunities to get more efficient. Then Sean will take you through kind of some financials and some views on where value creation, where we're going. We'll do a Q&A with us up here on the stage, and then I'll summarize things. We are going to stay on time because we need to get, you know, we have trip plan compliance to hit today, and we need to get the train to leave on time. On-time arrivals and destinations and departures are important. So we're going to get you to the train on time so we can get you back on time for those of you to catch your flights. So it's going to be an exciting day.
We're glad you're joining us, and we're glad you're all here. Let's get started. We have chosen this as our theme because we want to emphasize all three points. One, that we have a proven operating model. We have a great team. You're going to hopefully experience all of that today. We have momentum. We'll talk about that. And of course, what we're aspiring to and what we're going to deliver is profitable growth. Both those words are important together. You know that. I know that. And we're excited to be on this journey with you. Okay? Let's get started.
This is CSX Redefined, a 200-year-old story in the making, standing at the forefront of innovation and efficiency. With powerful momentum, we're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in freight transportation. Backed by our proven operating model, our commitment to excellence is fueling every decision, every mile, and every customer interaction, delivering innovative strategies that aren't just about moving goods. They're about moving industries. With cutting-edge technology and a relentless pursuit of efficiency, we're setting new standards for the future of transportation: 23,000 strong, 20,000 miles of rail, 26 states, connecting customers, communities, and culture. Our vast and enviable network is the backbone of countless supply chains, ensuring that essential goods reach their destinations on time, every time. Our mission is toward profitable growth through teamwork, strategic investments, and a focus on sustainability. We're not just enhancing our bottom line.
We're building a robust future for our customers, stakeholders, and partners. CSX, we're pulling for America.
All right. Thank you, Joe, and good morning, everyone. I'm incredibly excited to be here this morning, especially with this team up here on stage, and there are many others on the team here in the audience and many, many others listening in. In fact, there's a couple of listening parties at HQ today, so you know, we have a lot of initiatives you're going to hear about today, and it's an outcome of a lot of work by a lot of people, and I think we would all agree here on stage, it's really a privilege to be able to present a lot of those ideas. A lot of the hard work has taken years to establish the pipeline of opportunities that we have today, so we're really, really excited about what we have to present.
Now, when we think about the opportunities and when I think about our growth story, really, there's a few key things I want you to take away from today. One is our service. And you heard a little bit about it from our customers last night. Service does make a difference. Service creates opportunity. It doesn't necessarily beget growth. It begets opportunity. And what we think about that is the team has to go out and capture that opportunity. And you're going to see a pipeline today of those opportunities. We have a lot of confidence in what Mike and his team are doing. They're not only delivering the service today, but they have opportunity to deliver service that's going to differentiate us in the market in the future.
And so we're listening to our customers, and we're adapting, and we're listening to our customers and delivering solutions that meet their needs. So first, service. It all starts with service. Second, we have a record pipeline of opportunities, and the team is going to share with you what those opportunities are. Hundreds of initiatives over the last three years that we've been working hard on. And now, over the next three years, we're going to deliver on those opportunities, whether it's industrial development, whether it's modal conversion, whether it's thinking about new ways to reach our network. Those are the things in the pipeline that we've built and the foundation for growth ahead of us. And the third thing is, before you ask, we're going to deliver this growth very, very strong incremental margins.
Sean's going to talk to you a little bit about our fixed cost base and how we can leverage that. But also, Mike was going to talk to you about the capacity we have on the network, those opportunities to grow, to really leverage that. When you take out out-of-route miles, when you take out train starts, that creates capacity for us to grow as a network. So let's talk about growth. And when we look at growth, there's really two major factors, two major drivers of that growth. There's the economy and what our customers are doing. And quite frankly, we haven't had the wind at our back when you think about some of the markets we serve today. We do think there's cyclical opportunity, but that's not going to be the focus of the conversation today.
When you think about the trucking market, that opportunity in our modal is going to be there as the trucking rates recover and we really deliver on that. And that will only accelerate the opportunities we're seeing today. Even on the merchandise side, modal conversion, you heard about it a little bit last night. As trucking rates recover, those conversations become more robust, and the customers are more inclined to have those conversations with us. We have markets like housing, auto, steel that obviously have been impacted by interest rates and other factors, but we believe they're underrunning normalized demand. And so we expect that to recover. But we're not trying to put a pin in it and tell you that it's going to happen next year or the year after. But we'll participate in that when it comes.
What we're here today to talk about is those initiatives that we can control and that we can drive. And really, we look at four major buckets when we think about it. The first one is industrial development. And I can tell you, from our experience, there's nothing more powerful and nothing more incremental to CSX value proposition than a customer spending tens, hundreds, billions of dollars in investment and production that touches a CSX railroad. And what I can tell you, we're seeing a sea change. If you think about the last decades, we've seen industry leaving our network every year, and we're having to overcome that headwind. What we see over the next three years and beyond is that will now become a tailwind with industry coming back to the U.S. And it's a huge factor in our growth outlook.
We're seeing not only our large customers engage in those projects. We're seeing the small and medium-sized customers also investing as well, and Christina will talk about that a little bit more. Growth with our existing customers, you heard about this last night. There are opportunities, and they're accelerating based on our service we're able to deliver, based on the things we're doing, the conversations, the strategic thinking that we're able to do, our operating team coming to the table with our sales and marketing team and really coming up with solutions to deliver that. We believe there's a sea change there as well in our ability to engage in those customers. Emerging industries, when you think about the traditional emerging industries, you think maybe the battery technologies, and you think about renewable fuels.
And Arthur will talk about what we're doing in those areas where we see a lot of tremendous growth for our network. But there are also industries, from our perspective, that are emerging in terms of their opportunity to utilize the rail network. Waste, for instance, in the Northeast. We're running out of landfill space. So that waste is having to move further distances. And we're finding solutions to meet those demands. The aggregate market. We have an advantage. We serve the Florida market. The Florida market is in a deficit today. So we're having to serve that market through longer distances. Georgia, Alabama are now starting to serve those markets. We're seeing great opportunity partnering with customers to develop new solutions on the industrial development side and also on modal share conversion. So huge, huge opportunities that we see both in these three areas.
Then finally, we're going to go through some significant investments CSX has made. We're finally at the forefront of really converting those investments into future growth. The baseline has been set, and the investments have been made largely. Now is the opportunity over the next three years to really capitalize on those investments. Let's take a look at the map and where those investments are. If you think about our network today, we touch two-thirds of the most valuable consumers in the world. It's where freight wants to move to. We have the triangle that connects our network, connecting the South to the Northeast to the Midwest. When we think about investments and what we can do, it's how do we utilize this strategic asset to really deliver new solutions to our customers? How do we reach new customers?
How do we provide new solutions? And one of the things we talk a lot about is truck conversion. And there's a lot of opportunity, obviously, on the intermodal side, and we all know about that. And we're leveraging our best-in-class service to really go after that market. But there are also opportunities on the merchandise side. There's two initiatives that you have heard about. One is our transloading business. So when you think about TRANSFLO, we have dots all over our network, and we continue to add dots at a low incremental cost, often utilizing existing capacity and track to create new solutions. So if you think about markets like agriculture and forest products and chemicals, we're able to combine the truck with rail to reach customers that don't physically touch the rail network today.
It expands the addressable market for CSX, and we've seen tremendous growth from this initiative. We're continuing to find markets every day as we collaborate with customers to really identify where there are opportunities to expand, and as I mentioned, at a very, very low incremental cost to CSX. The other opportunity we found is on Quality Carriers. As many of you know, we made an acquisition three years ago. Quality Carriers serves our largest market, which is the chemical market. Not only have we gained great insight into how freight moves today, we've also introduced a new product, the ISO tank, that is now utilizing our intermodal network, the most efficient, most reliable Eastern network that's out there today, and what we found is we've invested in these, even in a challenged trucking market, and we're seeing customer uptake accelerate.
Two of the largest chemical customers out there have tried that product in the last 12 months, and now we're adopting it. And what we've seen is when we convince a customer to move their freight from truck to the ISO tank product, that the stickiness of that relationship has stayed there. And so if you ask Randy, the hardest challenge has been to get in the door, but we're now getting in the door, and we're having the largest two customers adopt it. So we're very, very excited about the growth that that can drive. Next, when you think about it, and I mentioned this before, a big opportunity for truck conversion is inland ports. And Maryclare will go into this a little bit more, but it's efficiently moving product from the ports into our network, taking trucks off the highway in a very, very efficient way.
We put dots on the map, as you can see, but we have future plans for more growth. And the great thing about this is it's our partners making this investment, and we're there to support them with the rail service. And finally, the Pan Am, MNBR, and Howard Street Tunnel. The Pan Am, as you know, was an acquisition we made. And quite frankly, the state of the railroad at the time that we made it was not in good shape. And we put significant capital in it. And Mike can tell you now that railroad is up to the service levels that we expect and that our customers expect. And what we're seeing as we're increasing the velocity of that network, as we're increasing the reliability, the amount of opportunities coming our way are significant.
We expect outgrowth in the New England region based on the investments we made. We have not realized those growth opportunities yet, and we see those really materializing over the next three years. The MNBR, as you may know, as you know, we just announced, the STB announced the approval of that acquisition or that transaction, so we're incredibly excited to work with our partners at the CPKC to create a link from Mexico and Texas into our Southeast markets. Think about Atlanta, Florida, and other areas of opportunity for us. We see tremendous truck volume moving in those lanes today that we're going to convert to rail in a very, very efficient service, so we're incredibly excited. That'll ramp up into the next year, and we'll continue to find opportunities as that service comes online.
Howard Street Tunnel, of all these investments, this is the one that we're making next year. And the exciting news is we thought we had to do it over three years. We're going to do it in less than a year. So this team's incredibly excited to be able to capitalize on those opportunities it creates. And Maryclare will go in depth on what that means for the network. But it basically opens up the last corridor that we need for double-stack capability. And the markets now that we will be able to reach post this transaction are tremendous and are going to provide a lot more opportunities for our customers to grow. So when you add it all up, obviously a very, very significant opportunity that you can see at the bottom, 600-700,000 carloads. We expect to capture a lot of that over time.
A lot of it will come in the next three years and beyond, but we all expect that pipeline of opportunities related to these investments only to grow from here, and then when we look at, and finally, before I hand it over to Christina, our go-to-market strategy, we think a lot about how do we segment our customers, so if you look at the left-hand side of the chart, we have our top 100 customers, and you can see the growth rate that we've experienced related to them, and hopefully, you saw some of the initiatives from last night where we're working with them through whiteboarding sessions and having those strategic discussions around investments and other things where we think that growth trajectory is going to be much higher going forward with our top 100 customers.
Then we have a huge tail beyond that, 2,500 customers that represent the tail in the all-other category. In CSX, we made some investments in our regional sales team and our go-to-market strategies. How do we go out and identify that business and those customers? They might be small customers for us, but they're very, very large customers with a lot of opportunity that, quite frankly, haven't engaged with the railroads in a long time in some instances. So we're investing in our team. We're investing in technology because when I, every other week, I talk to people about rail service. And inevitably, somebody will say, "But it's too complex for my business. It's too difficult to manage.
We don't have that capability internally." What we're doing is we're creating the solutions, not only investing in our Customer Solutions Group and Shannon's team to deliver that bespoke opportunity and be able to walk them through the opportunities. We're also delivering technology that makes experience seamless. This is how we're tackling those customers. And we see a much higher growth rate opportunity with those in our pipeline that you'll see from both Arthur and Maryclare and those businesses. So as I spoke about, industrial development is a huge piece of our growth story. And I know on earnings calls and other things, we've really highlighted that opportunity for us. And so with that, let me hand it over to Christina to walk through.
Thank you, Kevin. So I'm Christina Bottomley.
I'm our Vice President of Business Development and Real Estate. I appreciate you all coming down to Florida, and for those who are joining the webcast, thank you. I got a lot of great questions from you last night, and hopefully, I'll answer some of them now. As Kevin mentioned, and I know it's no surprise to anyone, but we've seen a ton of investment happening in the United States, and so what I want to bring up, walk you through here today is what CSX is doing to capture this investment and create a competitive advantage, so we have a best-in-class industrial development approach. Our team is field-based. In fact, you met one of our partners, Lee Lawson, last night, and what that means is we're boots on the ground, and it's about having a seat at that table for when that customer calls us.
We work with local economic developers, landowners, utility partners, and our shop provides a full suite of services, so when you think about it, it's everything from site selection, we actually do the site design in our team, the customer contract, and we hold that customer's hand so they have one point of contact from the very beginning until that first rail car is moved. That's key, and this muscle memory makes it so that we can put in service, meaning cars are moving on CSX every single year. We put in about 100 projects a year. It's an amazing muscle memory we're creating here, so when we looked at where all the investment is happening in the United States, as you can see here by this heat map, it's heavily concentrated in the Eastern United States.
That brings me to our first competitive advantage, which frankly is just our network. It's amazing when you look at where our network is. We're perfectly situated to capture this investment. It doesn't stop there. We connect to over 240 short-line partners that double our network. If you see the green lines here, that means we're not only able to capture more projects, but CSX gets the benefit of that line haul revenue. Now, we're working over 500 projects right now. It's up towards about 540 projects. I get a lot of questions because you hear buzz about the Southeast. Is this just concentrated in the Southeast? If you look at the red dots on the map, we have projects spanning from Maine to Miami, from Chicago down to New Orleans. We have them all over our network.
I did want to highlight a few customers. This year alone, these are some customers that we've won. And you can see they're varied in terms of size, but also location. Now, in just a minute, I want to walk you through how we win these projects. And a big thing are those rail serve sites. You can see here, blue dots on the map. We have almost 1,000 properties in our inventory. And Didi Caldwell talked to you through this a little bit last night that we're constantly trying to land a customer on and marketing to our customers. And this number is growing. So speaking of our Select Site program, we do something that is very unique to the railroad to create a competitive advantage. And it's definitely very unique on the Eastern Coast. And that is we partner with industry pros.
So you met with Didi GLS last night. We also partner with Austin Consulting. And the whole point of our program is to eliminate risk, eliminate uncertainty. So if you think of a project you have, the project can span years. If I'm coming out and I want to do a big manufacturing plant and I'm looking for a piece of property and you tell me, "Sure, you can have this property, but it's going to take three years to get environmental entitlement zoning," I'm going to pass on it. That's where this program is helpful. We start our work years, sometimes a decade, prior to even getting that first customer phone call. And by working with these consultants, they're able to help us identify issues with the land, remediate them, and continue this pipeline of shovel-ready sites.
And we also partner coaches with the property owners so that they understand what they need to do to make their site more marketable. And it's, again, creating this pipeline. Another competitive advantage we have is our team. So I mentioned this a little bit. When a customer comes to us, they get one point of contact from the very beginning to when that first carload is moved. That's even with our engineers. We have site design engineers sitting in sales and marketing, sitting in our industrial development team. And that's extremely beneficial because not only are they thinking about how to build the rail to be operationally efficient and safe, but they're thinking of future expansion. Everything we're doing here is about trying to get to market as fast as possible.
So when a customer comes to us and says they want to expand, we've already done the work when they originally came to us. And so the expansion goes far quicker. And again, it's about bringing carloads to the railroad faster. So with that, we talked a little bit about Novelis last night, and I wanted to show you a quick video.
Novelis is the largest producer of aluminum products, flat rolled aluminum products in the world, and the largest recycler. CSX has played a critical role in helping us design a connection from the main line into our site. And they have also provided critical input on the rail infrastructure that will be built within the site.
One of the things that's been so unique in our relationship and our partnership with CSX is not only opportunities like counseling, the mentoring, the advice that you're given by your colleagues at CSX when they are working a client with you, but they bring a wealth of experience as to how they've worked with clients, the rail needs and capacities. We've also worked with CSX on developing network optimization within our sites. CSX provides transportation services between two of our major existing facilities, and CSX has played a very important role in helping us optimize the transportation network in that service loop between those two sites. It's a fantastic relationship. We so much appreciate that engagement, and most certainly, if you have a rail site with CSX, make sure that you have that partnership in place.
Reach out to them because I can promise you they want to be helpful to you. The connections that CSX has in the industry, we have been able to partner with other third-party organizations that will be enablers in supporting our network in North America.
So I thought I'd highlight our most recent win with Novelis. This is the biggest project in Alabama's history and the most expensive. We talked about it a bit last night. It's coming in at $4 billion. Novelis is building an aluminum manufacturing plant, and they're going to use recycled cans. They plan to recycle 15 billion cans a year, and this will create 1,000 jobs. This is a prime example of why our Select Site process is important and how it's successful. So we got this project just like we get many others. We had no idea who the customer was.
We only knew the industry and some of the site requirements. It actually came to us as a code name, Project Skyfall, and within one quarter, we landed them on a CSX site. One quarter, and the way we did this is with our Select Site program. We had the land. They're taking down about 3,000 acres. It's going to take a lot of power and electricity to have this work, and that's the power of our program. We have sites like this so we can win those customers, win them quickly, and bring carloads to the railroad. This project should bring thousands of carloads over the next few years, and even better, this is just one project. I mentioned that muscle memory. We're doing this over and over and over again.
So I already talked to you a little bit about how our projects aren't concentrated in terms of geographical location. That's also the same in terms of industry. And I think this is what's really making our program sustainable into the future. We do see trends. You saw the EV trend for a bit. We see trends in the industry. Arthur's going to talk a little bit about what's happening in the construction industry. And that's where you see this pop in minerals. But because of the diversification in our portfolio, we're not only able to address those trends, but this has a long runway into the future. So I know the question on everyone's mind, what does this mean in terms of carload growth? Over the next three years, we expect to add 150-300,000 new carloads from this program.
If I look at projects that we've already won or we expect to win, we're very close to signing that contract, 200,000 new carloads. Now, if I look at our full pipeline and what we expect to win based on historical levels, that's another 100,000 carloads. And even better, this is just our known pipeline. Every year, we learn of new projects that are not included here. So this number could be much larger. And Arthur's going to talk in a minute about all the other merchandise opportunities. This is a piece of that bigger opportunity. So if I look at natural attrition, that's going to add 1%-2% incremental carloads every single year. That's what gets me excited about this program. So with that, I'll turn it over to Arthur.
All right. Thank you, Christina. And good morning, everyone. My name is Arthur Adams.
I have responsibility for our merchandise carload and our TRANSFLO business units. I'm excited to be here today to talk about our vision for leveraging deepening customer relationships to unlock growth potential. The last few years have been transformative at CSX in terms of our investment in service reliability and growth. Our teams are at the tip of the spear every day, listening, learning, understanding the customer's pain points, and then working seamlessly with our operating team to deliver solutions, and when done well, I'll show you examples of how our customers reward us for those opportunities. Our merchandise carload business has been an integral part of the value equation for CSX and will continue to be a viable component as we move forward.
Before I talk about the future, I'd like to give you a brief overview of the business and talk about some of our recent performance. When you think about the carload business at CSX, it represents roughly 60% of our freight revenue. It truly is a cross-section of the industrial economy and the consumptive economy. Each of the sectors that you see represented here has unique attributes in terms of service expectations and in terms of growth potential. Our role at CSX is to ensure that our solutions maximize the value that each of those opportunities represents. When done well, we win, as you see in the results. Since the fall of 2022, we have led the industry, our primary competition, truck mode, and eclipsed the industrial economy in terms of growth. There's no coincidence.
It's a lot of dedicated sales and marketing professionals, operating professionals, customer engagement team, working closely with our customers to meet them where they are and capture opportunity. Now, I'd like to talk about some of the key elements of our go-to-market strategy. But before I do that, I'd like you to hear from Mike Siegel with Sappi Paper.
I'm Mike Siegel. I work for Sappi North America and I'm the Director of Logistics and Operations Planning. Freight rail is a key component of our transportation network. We fully expect that our rail volume will grow, and CSX will be a key partner in that. I've been very pleased with our relationship with CSX because I feel like they really understand our challenges and our network. We've met with them multiple times to collaborate on ways where we can make things better.
We've developed some KPIs to look at congestion so that we can stay ahead of things. And one of the most important things for us is reliability. CSX has been very honest with us. So if things aren't going a certain way, they've been very clear with us, and then we can make a plan. If they weren't that way, that's where we get into difficulties. And so we really appreciate the honesty in the relationship and the visibility in terms of how things are operating. CSX is one of our key transportation partners. And so we are very much committed to our partnership with them, and we will do anything that we can to support them. We appreciate the investments they're making in the network to make it more reliable, and we're very appreciative of that and hope to support that moving forward.
Now, you probably saw some exuberance in Mike's voice, but I can tell you the first time we sat down three years ago, it was a very different conversation. So for context, Sappi is the largest customer on the former Pan Am. Kevin talked about the investments that we've made in hardening the infrastructure. Sappi was at a crossroads. They were in a decision cycle where they were looking to make a decision about whether or not to advance their proposition around supply chain efficiency with rail or truck. Thankfully, we were there at the right time. And so we went to work developing KPIs, making commitments, honoring those commitments, and earning back that trust. You heard him use some combination of collaboration, investment, trusted partnership more than a dozen times in 90 seconds.
I think that's emblematic of what we're hearing from the broader sentiment of customers that we're interfacing with. For those that were with us last night, you heard firsthand from both Chris Bohn and Peter Anderson about their experience with CSX. This is real, and it's sustainable, so I'll talk about a few key elements of our strategy, starting with resourcing for growth, whether it's investing in technology, rolling stock, hardening the infrastructure. All of these are critical elements to ensuring that our customers and our ability to align with them and meet their demand enables us to grow. The second component is modal conversion. The two elements of sustainability and the economic advantages of rail are unbeatable. Now, granted, we've seen some headwinds more recently because of the softening truck environment, but we do have examples. You heard this last night from Peter of modal conversion.
So we feel good about our prospects longer term as the market recovers. And then we talk about network connectivity and reach. You heard Kevin talk about Pan Am, the investments that we will make in MBR to unlock entry points across the southern tier of our network. We doubled the investment in our TRANSFLO network, 47 terminals across the Eastern U.S. that enable our customers to advance their reach into markets where they may not have rail capabilities today. And then finally, we can't take our eye off the ball. We must defend the existing book and then engage customers that at one time used rail. And this is the power of our regional sales team. So we have a geographically dispersed team that's knocking on doors, engaging that long tail that Kevin talked about, more than 2,500 customers, welcoming them back to rail.
There's still work that needs to be done there, but the prospects are promising. All of this is anchored against safe, ratable, reliable service. And so I'd like to showcase a few examples of opportunities in emergent markets where we see promise for growth, starting with our minerals business. So if you think about some of the favorable tailwinds that we're seeing in the industrial space as it relates to IIJA funding, some of the secular trends that we're seeing in demographic shifts across the Eastern U.S., particularly in the southern tier of our network, coupled with the unprecedented investments that we're seeing in the industrial space as we see a resurgence in reinvestment back into the U.S., it's a perfect recipe for opportunity, as you see in the overall construction spend projections.
And so in particular, our cement and our aggregates market is where we are seeing significant opportunities for growth. I'd like you to hear from Bill Corcoran with Heidelberg Materials as he talks about co-investment with CSX and the power of future opportunities that we'll unlock together.
Heidelberg is an aggregate cement company, so we own multiple quarries throughout the world. We also have several cement plants in North America. We have a new plant facility in Mitchell, Indiana, and CSX was a key component to getting that facility started. We're relying on CSX to have the right resources in place, the right people in place, and be ready to start when we start. And with any new facility or any new production plant, there could be hiccups and there could be delays.
So CSX was working with us hand in hand and making sure that they were there and that we were able to start shipping material day one, even though we may have not started exactly on the day that we said we were going to start. However, once we did start, CSX was prepared and ready to roll. We get with CSX quite often, and we work out our plans. We let them know what our forecasts are, what our production plans are, what our operation plans look like. And CSX will align their resources to match what we need from a logistics standpoint. And it's not telling us what we want to hear. It's telling us the truth, which we appreciate. Communication, it's vital to the success of our relationship with CSX. And we meet with CSX weekly.
We have some sort of conversations with CSX, whether it be about service, whether it be about new projects, or any future thinking that we're having those conversations with CSX.
Okay, so a few factoids about this facility. It's located in Mitchell, Indiana. It's the second largest cement production facility in North America, served exclusively by CSX. Post-construction, production output at this facility nearly quadrupled. You heard Bill talk about some of the delays in the startup. It's something that occurs from time to time. And customers often get anxiety about whether or not the railroad will adjust their plans to adapt to the customer's expectations. And I will tell you that we were there. Casey Albright, who you'll hear from later, myself, and an army of other folks were talking with Heidelberg daily about their startup plans, the delays.
And by meeting that customer where they were, it opened the door for future opportunity. You also heard Bill talk about that. And so they have a series of other nodes across the Eastern U.S. where we are working on conversion opportunities. Some of these opportunities have already been realized. Some of these opportunities are in flight, but the prospects are bright, and we're really excited about this opportunity because as they grow, we grow. Now, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about some of the great work that's taking place in our regional sales team. And it really starts with our agricultural and food products business. This is our second largest business unit within the merchandise portfolio. Generally grows commensurate to the consumptive economy. But there are a few green shoots, one of which is renewable fuels.
Based on the regulatory environment and demand from some customers for less carbon-intensive fuel sources, what you see in the light blue bar graphs are the growth potential opportunity across North America as you think about feedstock equivalents. It's roughly 140,000 carloads of opportunity. Some of the feedstock sources are animal fats and renderings, used cooking oil, but also soybean oil. In the event that soybean oil is one of the primary feedstocks, there's a 4x multiplier in terms of soybean byproduct, and that's used for a protein source for livestock. So I'm betting on the soybean oil because it's material in terms of the growth potential for us longer term. Next, you'll hear from Anthony Pellegrino with Saint Paul Commodities as he talks about the power of education and value creation.
Saint Paul Commodities is a merchandiser that specializes in commodity trading, and our specialty is oils and fats.
So we sell to the feed industry, the biodiesel markets, and renewable diesel. In the last two and a half years, we've grown about 400%. So we went and we invested in 1,100 rail cars, and we made a lot of mistakes. And mistakes are costly. So we reached out to CSX. We needed CSX's help to point us in the right direction on how to ship correctly. They understand my business completely, and they're helping us transport our goods to the end user in time, all the time. Legitimately coming into this, I believe all class one railroads are the same. What I get out of CSX is they've become a strategic partner to us, and that's important. Over my 25+ years in supply chain logistics, I know building great teams is crucial to the organization, but having a great partner, that's the key to your success.
CSX has become a great partner to Saint Paul Commodities. So that's what separates them from the other Class I. So I think this is reflective of meeting the customer where they are, listening, learning, and growing together. Our aspirations are to move them from that 2,500 to our top 100, and they have the growth potential to do that. And so not only are they expanding in rail infrastructure, they've reimagined their supply chain. We have a seat at the table. We are influencing how they think about rail in the context of their overall supply chain needs. They've converted from primarily truck to rail as a result of these conversations. And the future is bright. And so you heard him use the word trusted advisor a couple of times in his commentary. How do you make that transition from being a supplier to a trusted advisor?
The engagement strategy that we've used is really what we call whiteboarding sessions. I call it the art of the possible. It's sitting down with customers, decision-makers with no predetermined outcomes, understanding their pain points, developing very specific targets around growth, executing, celebrating those successes, and then starting that virtuous cycle again. We have an industrial waste customer, and we're now in our third iteration of whiteboard sessions, and we've unlocked several thousand carload opportunities for growth, not insignificant. We've touched around 45 customers to date since we started this engagement a couple of years ago. Our goal is to target 30-40 customers a year, and the payoff is significant. We believe that we can generate 50-100 basis points of incremental annualized value, revenue value, and potential. This is exciting. What is the potential opportunity for us?
As we look out over the horizon in the next three years, we see an excess of $1 billion of growth potential that we've identified. Let me be clear, this is customer-specific and is time-bound. It's reflective of the entire book of business that we serve. What do you need to believe in order to realize this potential? Well, A, it starts with service. It's table stakes. It gives us a seat at the table. Secondly, our ability to listen, learn, and adapt, have a seat at the table as decisions are being made. I reflect on Christina's commentary and what you saw today from José with Novelis. Those are generational assets. The first rolling facility of its kind built in this country in nearly a half a century served exclusively by us. We're excited about our growth prospects on a go-forward basis.
I'm really proud of what this team has accomplished thus far, but I'm also optimistic about what we'll accomplish in the future. I appreciate your time today. I'll turn it over to Maryclare to talk about Intermodal.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Arthur. My name is Maryclare Kenney, and I'm Vice President of Intermodal and Automotive at CSX. So you heard Kevin earlier, and you'll hear others today talk about the strength of the CSX network, and that absolutely applies to the Intermodal business as well. With service to more than 40 Intermodal terminals, we have comprehensive coverage of every major market in the Eastern U.S. We have extensive service offerings to and from every major East Coast port, as well as the Port of Mobile.
We have unparalleled access to the Southeast U.S., which, as you heard from Christina earlier, is really the epicenter of industrial development in the U.S. And we've delivered a superior Intermodal service product to our customers. What you're hearing is that we've established a very strong foundation. And what I'm going to talk about today is how we're going to leverage that foundation to develop and deliver innovative solutions to grow our share of wallet. So I think, as most of you are aware, we segment our Intermodal business into two primary categories: international and domestic. In recent years, international has accounted for about 40% of our Intermodal volume, while domestic has been about 60%. But what I'm going to highlight today is that we see significant opportunity to grow in both segments. In both areas, the focus will be around highway conversion, but how we enable it will differ.
On the international side, we see opportunity to add additional dots to the map through an inland port network. While on the domestic side, our focus will be around highway conversion in existing lanes of service and developing new service offerings leveraging existing terminals. I'm going to talk about both areas this morning, starting with international. But first, you're going to hear from Griff Lynch at the Georgia Ports Authority.
Where we're sitting today is the main office building for the Georgia Ports, and what's behind me is the single largest container terminal in the Western Hemisphere. It's over 1,500 acres. It's an amazing operation, and we want to keep growing it. We know from our studies that there's going to be a shortage of truckers in the coming years. So the Georgia Ports have said, "Hey, how do we get ahead of this?
What can we do differently?" And that's why we engage with CSX, and we said, "Look, how can we work together?" And it's a partnership. We don't come up with the plan. They don't come up. We do it together. And it's a shared investment. And it's no secret that rail provides the best sustainability plan over any other form of transportation. And so to the extent that we can increase our rail, the more sustainable we become and the better we become. So that's a big driver for us. If we think about Atlanta, that's about a three-and-a-half to four-hour truck drive. So one truck leaving here, they can only do one turn a day. We can throw 20, 30, 50, 100, 300 containers if needed on a full train and send it there in one day. And so in that case, rail can be a lot more efficient.
The Appalachia Regional Port, the ARP, this was a place, a tier-one county that is looking for jobs in northwest Georgia. Probably 10 years ago, we started a dialogue with CSX, and we said, "Hey, this looks like an interesting place for economic development because one of our missions is to create jobs for the state." So we went to CSX and said, "Hey, is there something we can do here? You've got a main line that runs through there." And they said, "Yeah, let's take a look." We did a marketing study, and we thought, "Wow, this is a great place for economic development." I can tell you, we opened that facility six years ago. It's been a great success for us. We're tied to about 600,000 jobs throughout the state, almost 10% of all jobs in the state with the help of CSX.
I will tell you that more and more, because of the things I just highlighted, customers are choosing rail. That's why our partnership with CSX is so important to the Georgia Ports Authority.
You heard Griff highlight the opportunity for rail growth in the international segment, and we absolutely agree. We believe our traditional international business will outpace the growth of global trade due to East Coast share gains driven by capacity, service, and manufacturing shifts in Southeast Asia. As a multiplier of this trend, we're advancing solutions to convert traffic that has traditionally moved over the road from East Coast ports into our inland geography. We see an opportunity to develop mid-tier and smaller market solutions through an inland port network.
As we evaluate the projects that are already underway and those that are under development, we see an opportunity set of about 400,000 moves over the highway today that are suitable for intermodal conversion through inland port connectivity. What's an inland port? An inland port is a partnership with a port authority supported by state funding to connect a coastal port to geographies further inland. In most instances, the port or a third party develops and operates the terminal. CSX is a key advisor, a trusted advisor during the development phase, and then we provide the rail service once the terminal is operational. When you think about these partnerships, the state, the port, and local communities all benefit from these investments.
The state can attract additional industrial development to the inland portion of their network because manufacturers and developers want efficient access to the global economy, and that can be facilitated by rail. The port can attract additional traffic through their marine terminal, and then they can efficiently load 100 containers on a single train versus having 100+ trucks come through their marine terminal gates, removing one container at a time. Local communities benefit because it's less highway congestion, less reinvestment in road infrastructure, and fewer greenhouse gas emissions. CSX's aligned steamship lines benefit because now they can more efficiently access additional inland markets, making them more competitive in the global supply chain. So in cooperation with several ports, CSX has established inland port connectivity to six markets, and we're advancing development over the next three to five years.
As has been previously announced, the Port of Mobile is under construction with Inland Port Montgomery, and we expect that facility to open in 2026. We announced a second partnership with Mobile earlier this year for service to the Decatur market to serve the growing Huntsville population. And we've also announced a partnership with the Georgia Ports Authority to create an inland service to our CCX terminal in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. We expect to begin routine service there early next year. In addition to these projects that have been made public, we continue to advance other inland port initiatives, and we look forward to talking more formally about those with you in the near future. So transitioning to the domestic side, we've established strong partnerships with both our channel partners and shippers in this space, and you're going to hear about that in this next video.
When I look across the Class I railroads, CSX is always the most engaging partner, and we see significant value delivered from that. As a long-term partner, I believe CSX has a real understanding of our supply chain and some of the challenges that we have within our customer base. I absolutely feel like CSX understands our challenges in the market. We are in lockstep from the CEO on down to our sales forces, and we're constantly and consistently communicating about what we're seeing in the market and how to adjust to win. A great example is our tech teams. They came together to integrate our teams to provide a better experience both for our shippers, but also for our drivers to create a seamless in-gate/out-gate, making them more efficient, us more profitable, and our customers have a better service experience.
Being able to get the right gate entrance times and exit times and having that consistent supply of boxes is critical for us to be able to implement our railroad strategy. So for us, having a railroad who can reliably and consistently deliver the transit times that they quote is critical for us to be able to service our customers. Because we have great predictability with CSX, that ultimately reduces our operating costs because we can more effectively utilize our assets and our company drivers. What's been most helpful for us is to see how CSX collaborates with our commercial team, understanding the needs of shippers, where we need to adjust, being flexible, where do we need to move capacity, and working with our direct sales team to provide that solution directly to our customers.
Okay, so you heard both Schneider and Diageo highlight how CSX is collaborating with customers, and we really see that as a core component to how we grow this segment. As you know, domestic intermodal has a wholesale channel of sale, but we have direct engagement with shippers through a national account sales program. The sales team engages with shippers to identify suitable highway conversion opportunities, and then they work with both the shipper and the channel partner to convert the business. They leverage an optimizer that we developed to analyze the shipper's highway traffic, and then they use their engagement with the shipper to proactively pursue opportunities that best fit the shipper's current supply chain needs. This engagement not only allows us to identify opportunities, but it also enables us to see barriers to conversion and determine what we can do differently to address specific challenges.
It also enables us to develop new solutions. So as we see volume trends and as we hear directly from shippers as to service requirements, we can identify what can be done differently. As an example of this, our engagement with a CPG shipper identified traffic that was moving between Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and northwest Ohio. This was not a lane that we'd previously offered intermodal service, but through engagement with both the shipper and the channel partner, the team worked together and identified a solution to leverage an existing train that worked at both of those terminals to create a new intermodal solution. This enabled us to convert over 4,000 annual loads from highway to rail. So you're probably wondering how important is this engagement and what's the size of the opportunity?
As we evaluate about 100 truck load files that we've received from our national account engagement, we see 2.6 million loads moving over the highway today, touching our eastern network that have an intermodal fit, meaning they move a minimum of 500-mile length of haul, and they have a reasonable dray distance at origin and destination. We took that same dataset and we cut it at a higher length of haul. We went to a minimum of 850 miles, and what we still see is an opportunity that would allow us to nearly double our current domestic portfolio. While we don't have perfect visibility beyond the files we've optimized, if we take those files and extrapolate out, looking at their proportion of our current domestic business, we believe there's north of 4 million loads that are suitable for intermodal conversion.
While I'm not standing here suggesting that we're going to convert every one of those, there's clearly a sizable opportunity in front of us. So the question is, how are we going to unlock it? First, as I've talked about, is that direct engagement with shippers, identifying the best lanes to focus on and addressing the barriers to conversion. The second element, and a critical element, is delivering a consistent and reliable service product. Shippers need to be able to effectively manage their supply chains. Variability, whether late or early, can create challenges for both their workforce and their facilities. Consistency not only enables a shipper to better plan their business, but it can also help drive out costs, improving intermodal's ability to deliver cost savings.
CSX led the industry on intermodal rail service throughout the challenging time of the pandemic, and we've been recognized by the JOC as a top intermodal rail service provider. We recognize we have to continue to deliver a consistent and reliable service product, and we have to drive customer centricity all the way down and through the terminal level. Our third area of focus is developing new and improved service offerings for our customers. So Kevin talked about it earlier, but we are addressing the last single-stack portion of our intermodal network through the Howard Street Tunnel clearance project. This unlocks efficient double-stack service on both our I-95 corridor between New England and Florida, as well as on the B&O route from Chicago to the Mid-Atlantic. This will create cost efficiency on our current business, and it'll double our capacity.
But in addition to this, it will allow us to be more competitive on traffic that originates in Chicago and west of Chicago destined to the Mid-Atlantic, as we can leverage the more direct B&O route. It will also enable us to take efficient double-stack trains via steel wheel interchange from our western rail partners versus requiring a channel partner that wants to initiate a box west of Chicago destined to Baltimore to do a rubber tire interchange in Chicago. On the I-95 corridor, the efficiency that we have there will also enable us to connect new service offerings with existing terminals in the southeast of our network up to the northeast. We expect this project to be complete in 2026, at which point we'll be able to pursue the 100,000+ incremental loads that we see moving over the highway today in these lanes.
To summarize intermodal, we see opportunity to convert highway traffic in both the international and the domestic space. By adding dots to the map, connecting dots through efficient domestic service, and working with our channel partners, our port partners, and our shippers in a new and different way, we expect to outpace GDP growth with our intermodal portfolio. With that, I will hand it back over to Kevin to close out our commercial section.
All right, thank you, Maryclare. Coal has experienced a dramatic change, to no one's surprise. When we think about coal today, just over a decade ago, coal represented 33% of our linehaul revenue. Today, that represents 18%. Even more dramatic has been the change in our domestic business. It represented 25% of our linehaul revenue just over a decade ago, and now that's 8%.
What you've seen is our portfolio shift to the export side. Over that same period of time, we've actually seen growth in our export business. Today, our export business represents over 50% of our portfolio and our exposure to coal. We see tremendous opportunities going forward to continue to capitalize on that. Joe and his team, who leads our coal business, continue to leverage our unique access into the international markets. When I talk about unique access, it's really our port access. We have more opportunities and more capabilities to offer to our customers than any other railroad in the East Coast. We touched five terminals today, all with ground storage. That's important because it offers the opportunity to be flexible, to blend coals, and also to be flexible with ships as they come into the terminals.
So the exciting news here is we are positioned with an export portfolio that now represents over half of our business today. And we see opportunities, particularly as we see domestic coal continue a slow decline, that we can push that volume into the international markets where we see growth in places like India and other markets. So the team has done a great job on that end. Now, on the domestic side, like I said, it represents 8% of our linehaul business today. And we see a slow, obviously, opportunity to work with our utility customers to pick up their utilization rates. And we'll work with it. And obviously, the political dynamics have changed, and we'll assess that, and I'm sure we might even have questions on that. Those are things to be TBD.
But I can tell you, with the data centers and all the investments being made, there's a huge need, particularly in our southeastern portion of our network, for more energy. And so we'll continue to manage that, work with customers, advantage our utilities, our coal-producing utilities, using utilities to make sure they remain in the market as long as they can. Now, if we wrap this all up, we talked about service, and service begets opportunity. It's really our people that are delivering on that opportunity through record pipeline that you heard about, whether it's on the industrial development side. And I can tell you this hasn't happened overnight. It's been two to three years in the making, working with customers, bringing our operating partners to the table, sharing what our capabilities are.
And those discussions are only accelerating, not only with our top 100 customers, but that long tail of 2,500 customers that haven't necessarily taken advantage of the rail capabilities today. And so we expect to deliver outgrowth versus the markets we serve, both in intermodal and merchandise. And on the coal side, obviously, we expect a decline on our domestic side, but given our mix and the opportunities ahead of us on the export side, we believe the growth can offset that. So when you think about our conviction and growth, it's not conjecture. It's based in data. We have a process around we're tracking these opportunities daily and following up, making sure we're staying ahead of the trends that are in the markets, whether growth industries, modal conversion, and investments that are being made.
Being on the forefront of those conversations is important because when you think about customers making supply chain decisions, once those are made, they're very, very hard to undo. So we have to be there when that facility is being built and make sure it has access to the CSX railroad. And we're doing a great job, as you can see from our portfolio and the size of it today. And I will add, we only have to deliver a portion of this backlog to deliver these results. And so there's opportunity, obviously, to exceed this. And certainly, with markets accelerating, whether it's the truck market improving, it'll only accelerate our opportunity to deliver on these goals. So with that, I think we're going to go on break. And Matthew, we're taking a 15-minute break, right? 15 minutes. Okay. 15 minutes, and we'll be back. Thank you.
In Hurricane Helene's wake, devastation and destruction stretching as far as the eye can see. A rushing river of rubble. The death toll from Hurricane Helene rises to 227. The destruction stretching more than 600 miles across state lines. This is going to be a long road to recovery. That is for sure. Since the storm, some lost everything, some lost not as much, but the community has pulled together, fired up chainsaws, checked on the elderly, opened the roads up, got generators if we could get them. CSX provided some of those generators for people. That's been life-saving. I'm volunteering my time in my truck to haul these supplies from Tennessee to this popular community, my home community, for the people.
And so that the people that can get out by four-wheeler, side-by-side, whatever, can at least get to a central location and get supplies, food, blankets, medicine, whatever we can get them. A lot of the people that you see, and either had themselves or family members impacted by this flooding, and we decided that we wanted to feed members of the railroad and their families, anybody that would need something warm to eat. A lot of their family members are displaced. A lot of them have lost their homes.
So it was just a way that we thought we could get their mind off of it, the cleanup effort, and to have a cookout and to get these guys together to hug each other, to love on one another, and to tell them that we love them and we're caring about them and let them tell their stories of how this storm has impacted them. Times of tragedies like this, you really see the community come together. And we've got certain ones that work for CSX that epitomize what it is to have a servant's heart nonstop. They've relentlessly been out, daylight, dark, and delivering goods to the communities around Erwin, Poplar, North Carolina, Spruce Pine, North Carolina, some of the places that's really been affected by this flood.
It's just really been mind-boggling to see the amount of support that CSX has given this community and the things that they've donated is really being put to use and will continue to make an impact on these people's lives for many days to come. I think the number one reason for us being able to achieve 2,000 days injury-free here in Buffalo is our job briefings. That's not just FRA injury. It's injuries in total, which means all of our employees on both sides come to work every day, go home from work every day in the same condition that they arrived in. Biggest thing for today. We start out every day as a group together, both in the yard and the shop, and we job brief together. We talk about any possible hazards that we could encounter that day.
Then as we go throughout the day, we do re-job brief. Tomorrow will be 31 years on the railroad injury-free. I'm the local chairman for the Carmen here. And today's my birthday, which I tie in with injury-free. Without being injury-free, I wouldn't be here for the birthday. We provide for my family. They're the reason I'm as safe as I am. And they remind me of that every day. You're coming to work to provide for your family. And if something happens to your work, that's going to impact your life at home because you're questioning if you're going to be able to provide for your family. I am honestly not surprised at all by how well they make safety a lifestyle here. You can definitely tell the way that they work with each other.
It takes everybody, you know, every single person seeing something, saying something to follow those operating safety guidelines at CSX, and they maintain that very well. Safety briefing is critical. In addition to that, as craftsmen, we rely on each other to point out safety items. And if I'm not watching out, I know my fellow employees are going to be watching out. And we kind of self-correct each other. I have employees, in terms of safety, they made up a little placard with the saying about looking out for each other.
Just one morning, he shows up to work, comes up to me, says, "Hey, Dan, I want to show you what I made last night." And I don't know what else I can ask for from an employee willing to come in, use their own time, and say, "Hey, if someone sits here and reads this, it might help someone today," remind them to look out for one another. Because at the end of the day, we have nothing if we're not looking out for each other. So the Howard Street Tunnel Project is a $500 million project to bring double-stack container service to the Port of Baltimore. This is a 1.7-mile tunnel, and it was built in the 1890s. So an entire city and communities have grown up above it and below the tunnel. And then outside of the tunnel envelope itself, we have bridges.
In Baltimore, three bridge projects, and then from Baltimore to Philadelphia, another 20 projects that had to be cleared to open up the double-stack service out of Baltimore, so the biggest benefit is going to be the efficiency of moving twice as much freight with the same amount of locomotive power. There's going to be fuel savings, cost savings, and it makes our network much more efficient. I'm excited as a Baltimorean and as a railroader to see that we're bringing double-stack container service to the Port of Baltimore because it's a long time in the making. It's taken us 46 years to get to the time when we'll have the first train arriving at the Port of Baltimore, and it's seven months and two days since the Key Bridge collapsed, shutting down the port.
What this project showed me is that with vision and like-minded people that can stay dedicated towards accomplishing a difficult task and when you trust one another, that we can accomplish great things together. My name's Dilmer Browning. I've been here for 47 and a half years, started in May of 1977. When I started, it was L&N Railroad, and then it went to the SCL, L&N, the Family Lines, and then it went to Seaboard System, and then it finally went to CSX. Most people don't like their job, and I do. It was fun, you know? I mean, it's not work. It's really not, you know? And I'm sure I'm going to miss it. This is Dilmer's last time running a locomotive. Dilmer's lifetime operating a train is going to be his son's first time operating a train.
How much more perfect is that than to symbolize passing the torch? This is going to be a great time for his son to actually see what his dad has done. All this time he's been gone. In 2004, when I first started working with him, he'd been with the railroad almost 30 years. He's good. He's very punctual. Everybody kind of sets their standards against him because he always sets his standards so high. I can remember coming down here to the yard office as a kid with him and seeing the engines and just thinking that that's something that I want to do, you know? And my dad, you know, with him being gone and stuff, I didn't fully know exactly what he was doing, but I knew that he worked for the railroad and stuff.
But now that I'm older and I've worked for two years out here, I have a lot more respect for him. I mean, this is something I'll be able to talk about with my kids one day, you know? It's kind of cool that I get to work with my dad today. He does a good job. He's got some of my qualities, you know? Getting to work on time and doing your job. Don't argue and don't complain, you know? I tried to talk him out of it, but there wasn't no talking him out of it. His mind's made up, and I'm glad he did, you know? It's a good job. It really is. So I just hope he has a good career like I did. It's huge for the Brownings. It's huge for CSX. And it really signifies exactly what's going on with this company.
We're training so many people right now, new conductors and locomotive engineers as well. Even though Dilmer's retiring, we're all going to be a little bit of Dilmer still running the locomotives because he trained us all.
All right, and I think we're ready to restart. Thanks again. Give maybe a moment to everybody take their seats. Excuse me. All right, very good, so moving into the next segment of our presentation today, I'm very, very happy to be joined by a couple of gentlemen. We have Mike Cory, who's our Chief Operating Officer, who many of you have already met. We also have Casey Albright, who's our Senior Vice President, Network Operations and Service Design. We're going to have something which I know many of you are familiar with. We're going to have something like a fireside chat to talk through some of the operations.
And as you see the title of this, Advancing a Proven Model. Again, we will stay on time, always on time, with Mike on stage here. That's even that more important. More at risk is what he's trying to say, but. I'm a diplomat. That's investor relations.
And a good DJ.
Indeed. Thank you. Thank you. It's soothing. So Mike, let's start with you. I've got a few questions for you. You came here to CSX after years at CN, right? You've had the chance now over the course of a year and change to compare two very, very different networks, right? Given your experience, what makes the CSX network different compared to that which you experienced at CN? And then in particular, what do you see as the main opportunities emerging here in this network here at CSX?
Oh, yeah, thanks. And thanks, everybody, again.
We're going to keep repeating this because you also are part of this extended team we're creating. So I appreciate y'all coming down. You know, obviously, there are differences in the complexity, the density of the customers, the infrastructure every 100 miles. And I mean everything from tracks and yards to facilities that we either maintain or do something else is big at CSX. And you saw great presentations from our marketing and sales teams about the opportunity. But that complexity and density is something I'm—I don't want to say I'm not used to, but it's a big thing here. And then really that proximity to customers and the population and economic growth, the front-facing dealing you do from operations with customers here is greater. But really, it's pretty much the same. It's a scheduled railroad. It's got great railroaders. There's a lot of opportunities.
This is no different in my eyes than what I came from. It's the same thing. And you want to talk about opportunities, it starts with if you look at that network, we have opportunity to optimize it. And what I mean by that is I come from a linear railway. And the more linear we can make this, the better. You know, taking - I don't want to say redundant facilities, but facilities that aren't performing where they can in terms of efficiency and turning them into something that creates speed, increases capacity, and enables growth, what we're talking about today. So from a network perspective, and that's not just building things. That's getting down on the ground. When I talk about a network, we have a network of people out there doing work.
And to get out there and increase that capacity through just better teaching, better learning, accountability, but really sharing all the good things we have at this company. So the network, I'm looking forward to really going forward with that. And Casey's going to talk more about that later, as will I. The next biggest thing, and really probably to me before the network, it's just developing the talent and the culture opportunities we have here. There's an abundant pool of talent. You're meeting them here. You're going to meet them on the train. And it doesn't matter what part of CSX you talk to. We're talent-rich. And for myself, I've had the opportunity. I've met every senior leader in operations and many others. But there's a lot of folks that have been through a lot of change here. And they really understand scheduled railroading.
And they really, really understand the value of the 1CSX opportunity that we're creating to be able to work with each other and take those strengths and share them. And then the other big opportunity we have here is to create a safe culture that really focuses on exposing exposures, reducing them, but from the ground up, understanding that there's an environment here where we care. And we're going to make a difference in terms of people not just coming to work safely, but coming and feeling valued because they're creating value. So that culture is a big piece. You're going to hear that the next thing to me is always systems and data. I mean, I grew up just looking at things to try again to make it linear and connected.
And you're going to hear Steve and Dave talk on the train, give you a good presentation on pretty much a complete systems overhaul. And they're doing the heavy lifting right now. I'm not going to get into what they're going to tell you because first of all, I don't know it as well. But what I know is the opportunity for us to create suites of tools for our operating officers to see data in a different way, to see that elongated view that I want them to have that I have. These systems, this ability, the speed we'll be able to have one single source of information. That's a huge opportunity here. And then the last piece, and again, they're all the most important, we can drive service improvements. You heard Kevin, Maryclare, Arthur, Christina. Everything that they're out there selling is our product.
And so from the ground up, engaging Brandon, you had a question last night. You should have just asked it at the table. Big focus on connecting those people that we have at the front line with our customers. Best decisions are made at the interaction of the customer activity. And we're equipping them, and we're doing everything we can to make sure they have every opportunity to get the information to make quick, good decisions in line with their customer partner. And that's something I'm not going to say I'm not used to, but it's really going to be the key to our success here. Getting those decisions at the right level in the service of the customer and making sure we're communicating so they know when we see opportunity, it's just not for us. It's for the whole entire team.
You're going to hear more about that from Chantel and Shannon. I'm probably over my time, so that's my view.
Oh, it's all good, Mike.
You didn't give me any code. He's going to give me a code if I go over.
Casey, you bring a much different perspective. You've been at CSX for over 25 years. You have seen this network evolve over time. Love to hear from you. What's been changing over the past year or so? What's working differently? What's working better from what you see?
Sure. As you think about it, Mike calls this a complex network. And it is if you look at that map. I mean, that's the map. That's where we serve the customers that Kevin and the team talked about up here.
I mean, that's where we do the 240 interchanges a day that Christina and her team were talking about and focuses on. But this railroad, it's also complex, but it's very flexible. It's resilient. We're going to continue to build resiliency into this network with Mike as we continue to look around and see what else we can do. But we talked about the storms a lot last night. And if you think about Hurricane Helene and what Sean talked about at the quarter call on our Blue Ridge Subdivision, we lost that part of our railroad. Sean's team got together the day after. And within 24, 36 hours, this resilient railroad, that traffic that was moving across that corridor was moving a different route across this complex network. We have resiliency built into this thing.
As we look at this and the group talked about the different opportunities and the different growth that's going to come out here, we're going to continue to look at this network and see how we utilize it. I mean, this is our masterpiece right here. This is what we have. This is what we have to offer, and we're going to use it. Mike's come in and taught us a lot of stuff about how what we've done today may not be what we're going to have to do tomorrow. Today's decision is not going to be tomorrow's answer. He says it much better than I do. But that's what we're getting out there. That's what we're looking at. That's what we're preaching.
Before, if it was something that came our way and it may have not fit perfectly into what we were currently doing, I'm not sure it would have gotten the attention it deserved. And that's what we're doing. And that's what Kevin and the team talked about, just that collaboration that's there and how we're working together to find those opportunities and make it fit into this network. Yeah. And the other thing too, Mike talked about it on the quarter call. Volumes were up 3% in the third quarter. We reduced train starts by 3% that same quarter. So in this network, there's a lot of capacity, and we're figuring out how to use it and doing it with less resources out there.
Got it. That's great.
Mike, maybe before we talk about some of the initiatives on service and efficiency that I know the team is working on, let's talk a little bit about culture as the foundation of it all. They hear from you. They hear from Joe about how important it is to have a successful culture here at the railroad. But maybe for this group, why should the people out here, these investors, these analysts, why should they care about culture as it applies here at CSX?
You know, culture is everything. And I have been really fortunate. Not only did I work at a company that really not just built a culture, but the culture drove the results. I started playing hockey as a young kid. And I've been on such great teams. And really, the experience of winning is something you build by winning.
And I've had this great experience with teammates. You know them all. Working for people, working with people, that it was about culture. And let's be honest, employees that care about their work, they perform better. They're more productive. Good culture improves retention, reduces hiring. And really, the expense of it all, the churn. There's been a tremendous change at CSX the last few years. You're all aware of it. And it's been tough. But I tell you what, I've been through a lot of those changes. And I not only feel for what people have gone through, but it's time, as Casey said, what we did yesterday, we don't have to do tomorrow. We can be successful in a different way.
And that's really what this culture that we're building, that Joe came and started. This is about all of the talent we have and putting those synergies together and creating the value we know we can create. But from an operations perspective, we've got a large focus on our operations supervisors, on their development. And really, for me, it's about providing clarity. It's making sure they understand what they're accountable for, but not to the point that they hide away from those things that don't work. That's what I'm here for, for the help and the teaching. And really, everything we do, everything we talk about, we ensure the value that we're talking about is identified and that they have a means to extract it.
This is how we're learning and starting to understand better forms of KPIs than maybe we've had in the past that will lead us to what we really want. The other thing is about the consistency within our management team. It starts with me. I'm accountable for everybody right down at the front line supervisor. We are all accountable for this company, for our customers, our shareholders, and other stakeholders to execute on the goals that we align to. When you ask me about culture, it's probably 90% of what I think about. This is a company that has years of runway. The talent that we have, it would be a shame not to build a winning culture with it.
Got it. Casey, let's go back to you. You lead service design for the entire network here at CSX.
And we've heard a lot about how you've been working closely with the commercial team to ensure that we're there, we're responsive to the customers, we're responsive to their needs. Could you talk a little bit about how that's working differently and better? And if there's any places where that type of collaboration has helped win business and bring business here to CSX?
Yeah, absolutely. First off, Mike uses a lot of hockey references. And you got to translate a little bit. Casey is a Hoosier from Indiana. Yeah. He says something, I'm like, "Oh, pick and roll." Okay, I got it. You got to translate it to basketball. I'm learning basketball talk. But anyway, yes. Tons of opportunities, Matt. I mean, the collaboration here is, like you said at the beginning, I've been here a long time, almost 27 years.
I've never seen the collaboration to the way it is now. I mean, it's not a decision being handed out and here we go. Let's get the right people in the room as we roll through this thing. Teach people. Get the right groups together. That way they can go and they can learn and they get it down to other. Like Mike said, get this down to the front level supervisors. A great example to your question is back in May, we had a very large intermodal customer come to us. They were on a tight time frame. They needed to operate from point A to point B, a location that we didn't do. It wasn't in our wheelhouse. Gave it to Chantel, the team, Carrie. You'll hear from them on the panel here later on the intermodal side.
Within a week's time, we had a solution. Within three weeks' time, we were moving the train and moving the traffic. We actually met with this customer yesterday morning in Jacksonville. This lane that we've opened up is now growing. So it's extremely successful. We were quick, like Mike said, in making decisions. We got it out there, and there we went. You heard Arthur talk about it. When Arthur and Eric, Torri, their teams get together in these whiteboarding sessions, we're present in that. We've done that with different waste customers. We've done it with different metals, different aggregate customers. We're right there in the room because the group from the different design side, we know if we're out there, we know what our model shows, what we can do. But we want to listen to them as well. Different opportunities they have.
We make the change stuff around a little bit and be a little bit flexible. Is it single merchandise carload? Is it something on the bulk side? And how do we fit that into this model that Matthew saw?
Right. Mike, we did hear a lot from the commercial team just before, and they outlined a lot of, I think, really exciting initiatives about bringing growth here to the network. Why do you feel certain that we actually have the capacity to service that growth and to service it well?
Yeah, that's a good question, Matt. You know, again, the network itself, when it comes to pure double track and capacity, it's greater than I'm used to in that sense with the volume that we have.
In terms of merchandise and intermodal local service lanes in various locations, in most locations, we have incremental capacity on the service we provide. And as Casey said, our focus is really on not reducing starts. We want to grow starts because we want new business, but making sure we're maximizing the use of the trains we run. And so from just a pure incremental volume coming on, we have good capacity on the existing trains and service we provide today. Our infrastructure is in really great shape. And we don't have a lot of need for mainline capital. We have some locations where we're going to put an Amtrak service on between Mobile and New Orleans. And jointly with the government, we're putting sidings in there. And we have the odd key location. But for the most part, we're staying in check.
And it's important, obviously, that we do with Christina, Arthur, Maryclare, and the teams. But from where we stand right now, the things that we have in place really are not capital intensive. And really, we're targeting capacity growth, train speed, reducing bottlenecks, consolidating those starts I talked about, but really a focus on reducing out-of-route miles. And so when I look at this network and the things, and we're going to talk, I'm sure you're going to ask a question about the opportunities we have. It's nice to see that the work we're going to do has a reason. And that reason is that growth you all saw. And the point of this is that this isn't a whole lot of new construction of anything.
This is looking at what we have existing and making it more efficient and then bringing it together to capture this growth, but at that low incremental cost. And as Casey said, we're really at the start of everything our customers are doing. And that's operations, sales, and marketing, the entire CSX team. We are a service provider, and we understand that. So when they're ready to grow, we're right there. Our goal, and it is, we want to be right there along with them. Let's follow up on that service question, the service theme. Investors here, they hear us talk about the importance of service. We talk about the service reliability. You heard that from our customers, how important that is. Bottom line right now, how is the network running right in terms of the service today? And is there an opportunity for us to get better? Yeah.
And I've spoken to quite a few last night, but we had, hey, those storms really hit us. And so since August, it's been a churn of either strikes, storms, strikes. And I can honestly say this last week, we're back fluid. Not that we weren't. You can see, again, we took action to reduce some of the congestion, whether it was train starts, but move around our network so we had fluidity. And so we really stayed abreast of any major customer concerns by taking that approach. We do not sit back. We're on the edge of our seats. So the network is back. It's been a little tough slugging since August. July was probably one of our record months in terms of good operating metrics.
But really, it just comes back down to our focus is on first and last mile service and over-the-road service for customers and cost. And those are the two big metrics we look at all the time. So while we're jostling around here, we always keep service first in mind and that cost right alongside of it. And that's what we did throughout that period. Now, we've got a lot of initiatives in place that I've spoken about. But we always, always want to have a really positive tension between service and efficiency. That always has to take place. Overservicing probably says you're not doing the right service. And not spending enough isn't getting what the customer needs to continue to do what they do. So there's always that balance, that tension. But that's what keeps us engaged. That's what keeps us challenged.
That's what keeps us wanting to learn more, again, about our customer requirements. We're great railroaders. These folks have been through PSR. They get it. And I'm not going to say it's not difficult because we are an outdoor sport and all those great things. But the more we can integrate that customer need into our minds, we are making more efficient use of the model we have today. And that's the goal. Yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Yeah. I mean, that leads great for the next question, which is I've talked to both of you about getting out in the field, looking at data, talking to people, looking at the network as a whole to find ways to make it run more efficiently, both at the individual location and then throughout.
One of the examples that comes to mind that I've talked to both of you about is about Cumberland. Could you talk a little bit about what's happening at this particular location, why it's important, and what the benefits are?
Yeah. And look, I'll give you the why in the house. So great decisions were made in many areas across any railroad. And times change. And this isn't about reopening things. Some of these locations we're going to talk about, they were never closed. Changes were made as a result of whatever the case was. And now as we go back and we look, we find that we're able to really create some mass in locations that had its production spread out. Sorry, there's something there.
And that traffic that was spread out because we decided to do some things in some of the yards, we're bringing it back to create the mass and really improve the efficiency. And in this case at Cumberland, and I think we're going to show a picture of the yard, what it looked like. But essentially, we're changing the flow of traffic from around and through upstate New York to direct path it from Mid-Atlantic to East Coast ports. And if you watch it through, today we go up through Baltimore and around with this traffic, we're going straight across. And you might look at that and go, "Well, geez, that's a no-brainer." Well, at the time when I viewed how the traffic was moving, what condition the yard was in, I just asked the question.
And again, at the time, it made sense to shut the yard down. Excuse me, to reduce the production in the yard. But by opening it back up, I mean, you're talking about 58,000 handlings. You're talking 20 million out-of-route miles. You're reducing local starts in these places we spread the production out to. So those are all facilities that you have a spiral of cost to. And really what we did was we took 500 cars that were not moving the way they should have in the direct way through Cumberland, and we put them back in. We're creating blocking now that was done in some instances where cars were set off just outside of Cumberland in a facility, sat 24 hours and switched. And that same train that set them off, the next day picked them up again.
This will, in that instance, reduce the dwell by 16 hours. So these are the things we're looking for. We're looking at a more linear approach. The further we can move the car without touching it is our goal. And it's going to take some alterations. And they're certainly not overly capital intensive. A couple of benefits from this is we have a major locomotive facility in Cumberland. And as a result of the way our service was running, we had to take locomotive stops, stop premium intermodal trains to take locomotives off to get them to the shop for their regular maintenance or run by it and have the unit go out of service. And so now we have the right amount of manifest merchandise trains going through there that we can cycle the power on a regular basis, probably improve the efficiency of Cumberland in the locomotive shop.
And here's the best thing. Using some lean principles, but really using teamwork, we found the capital by better improvements to our engineering capital programs. And that was between transportation, engineering, focusing on getting the track. And all those things that seem easy, well, those things paid for this yard.
Teamwork. Maybe we could bring up, and you could see a real quick question or a real quick view of what was at Cumberland before and then what Cumberland looks like after, which I think is pretty stark. So there was nothing there on that side. And there were tracks on the other side. Casey, as you're looking at this and you're thinking about the entire network, are there other opportunities at CSX to do something similar to here?
There are, Matt.
We continue to look at this as we just look at how our network is shaped and how we can take advantage of it. Just a few to mention on there. I mean, you see Willard. Just last week, again, we put an additional couple of hundred cars into Willard just by connecting a couple of tracks there. If you think about where Willard sits in our network, its primary spot between Chicago and the New York-New Jersey area, right? Very key initiative. So you got traffic there that can go and prevent touches at other locations like Mike's talking about. Less touches means you're getting less cars. It means you're moving across your network faster, right? Should have cars just fall out of your network less risk. That's right, less risk. A couple of other ones on the map there. You see Louisville and Richmond.
These were yards that were built decades ago. And over time, things change, right? I mean, Louisville is a primary spot for our auto network. But like I said earlier, you got Arthur Adams and team out there. We got a major steel customer that's going to almost double in volume next year. And they're sitting right outside of Louisville. Being able to just make these minor changes inside these yards, getting the additional capacity, but also taking miles out of the existing traffic, that's what we're looking for as we go through these locations. Everyone's going to get to see Waycross today. You saw the heat map that Christina put up there of how Waycross basically protects Florida for CSX. You come to Florida, you're going to go through Waycross. And we're the only Class I that gets all the way through the state of Florida.
So any capacity we can generate in the yard at Waycross is going to do nothing but help us with this growth that's coming to the state of Florida. Very, very well positioned.
All right. Well, just last thing. I want to make sure we recover. We're going to cover it quickly. Let's talk a little bit about technology and how you're all using it. I know it's been a big factor in both of you in terms of how.
That's my baby there on the screen.
How are you using data more effectively here at CSX to drive better, quicker, more effective decisions? So how is that going into effect today?
You want me to kick it off? Again, I come from a linear railway.
What I found when I came was, from an operating perspective, the systems that we have were more focused on either a regional, a customer, or something that wasn't far enough out that the operating officers can really see what's going to transpire. Not have something come, do your job, and then get measured the next day. So all this does is provide one single source of information, one single source of data, of truth, where we can have common language when we have calls, which we like to do. And we use these types of tools not only to manage the business coming into terminals, but in today's world, before this, our operating officers had to go to four to five different systems to get information.
Somebody in another terminal will go to four to five other different ones and then try to get the language and try to, because communication in the railroad is everything. Specifics, it's even how we move our we don't allow crews to say forward and backward without a locomotive identification because everything needs to be specific or things go wrong. This gets to the specificity, excuse me, of what that terminal far enough out is going to have to do in the next 24 to 48 hours. Everything they want to learn or know about that locomotive, that crew, that subdivision is a click away. Now, we haven't completed it yet. It's being done in stages. Again, Steve and Dave will talk to you, but to give real-time-driven information, and it's streamlined, it's very actionable.
What we're really trying to do is help them make better decisions. That's really what it is. So it's the speed of information. It's the single source. It's consistent. And it's a language we can all speak. That's one little thing. Because the other suite of tools, everything is geared again to help our supervisors find what the value is to extract and give them the right tools to extract it. That's what we're all about. And that's what, again, Steve and Dave will walk you through some exciting things we're doing. They're doing the heavy lifting right now. But this is extremely important to us. And we're over the time limit.
Yep. But that's great. We did pretty good, though. No, it worked out well. It worked out well.
And we're here all day, folks. So got lots to talk about.
These two do well together, as you can see here on the screen and here in place. So thank you both. Mike, Casey, thanks so much for being part of this. And thank you.
For those on the webcast, what's happening in the conference room here today is we're passing out my presentation. So folks are eagerly awaiting that because it's got the numbers in it. It's probably already posted on the webcast. If it's not, it'll be up there momentarily. But as that goes around, I'm going to go ahead and get started. And just by way of background, many of you know, some may not know, but I've been with CSX now for about 20 years. And during that time, there's been a lot of different things that have changed.
But there's been one thing, and it's a distinct competitive advantage that CSX has that simply has not changed. And that is the power of our network. You've heard it today. We have 20,000 route miles in the eastern half of the United States. We serve two-thirds of the U.S. population. We have a merchandise franchise that's unparalleled. We've got an intermodal profile that's growing and has opportunity. And from an industrial development standpoint, we're right in the heart of all the activity. It's an exciting time to be at CSX because what I'll tell you is that up until now, we really have not fully leveraged the power of this distinct network that we've got here at CSX. So before I get into, and you've already flipped to it, before I get into the forward projections, I want to take a minute to go backwards.
So I mentioned the last time we've been in front of you at an investor day like this, it's been six and a half years. And some of you may or may not have followed our stock and our company for that long. So just to kind of set the stage of where we were all the way back in 2018, it was a period of time where we were still at the beginning of our operational transformation. And CSX was the first U.S. class one railroad to adopt scheduled railroading. And there were a lot of skeptics, particularly because we were an eastern U.S. railroad with a lot of population, a lot of complexity in the network, as you heard from Mike and Casey. So the question was, can it actually be done? Can it be done efficiently?
But regardless, we put out targets that said that we were going to hit a 60 OR, what we now call a 40% margin by 2020. And even though 2020 was a pandemic year, I'm happy to report we hit a 40% margin in that year. And our average margin since then has been in excess of 40%. We also talked about how the margin improvement, along with improved asset efficiency, resulting in lower capital spending, would drive an increase in free cash flow. We were averaging a little over $1 billion a year in free cash flow. We told you that in a three-year period, we'd get to $8.5 billion. We exceeded that, and it's continued. So our cash flow today is three times greater than it was pre-transformation.
We also promised that we would give a lot of that cash back to you, the shareholders, in the form of dividends and share repurchases, and we've done just that, over $25 billion in the last six years, and that model will continue going forward. When we look at how CSX has performed relative to the rest of the industry, if you look at any key valuation metric, we've far exceeded the performance of our peers during this time frame. We've grown operating income in the mid to high single digits. We've grown EPS nearly 20% a year, and free cash flow has gone up by over 20% annually. This is significant outperformance. If we look at margins, we've improved our operating margins by almost 700 basis points, and this is a period of relatively low economic growth and recent high inflation.
So half of the S&P has actually kept margins flat or seen margin degradation. CSX is a rare company, particularly when you consider the fact we acquired a trucking company. And if you were to adjust for that, our margins are up nearly 1,000 basis points during this time. When I look at these numbers, I think it's evidence of a company that's well run, that's got momentum, and that's committed to meeting and exceeding the targets it sets. So how did we get there? It's no secret that safety, service, and efficiency were a key driver. You all look at a lot of data that this industry and our company produce. We've got even more metrics that we track internally. So there's dozens of things I could have put up on this page.
And most of those service and efficiency measures have improved at least 20% over this time frame. You see evidence of that here across locomotive, freight car, employee efficiency, velocity. So what does this do for us? The first thing is it gives us a cost structure advantage, not just relative to our rail peers, but also, importantly, relative to our trucking competition. As the trucking market continues to normalize, this is really going to work to CSX's advantage. It also provides capacity. Having fewer assets on the network, running fewer trains, gives us the ability to grow and absorb that growth at high incremental margins. And lastly, it reduces the capital intensity of the business. So we reduced capital, and we're able to continue to invest at a ratable pace and support the growth that we see coming the next few years.
So let's talk about growth for a minute, right? Because the knock on the rail industry has been for the 40+ years since we were deregulated, we haven't been able to grow our merchandise volumes. And there's truth to that. But what you heard from Arthur earlier is that in the last couple of years, we're shifting the tide. We're turning it here at CSX. And it hasn't been profound because the industrial economy has kind of been stuck in neutral. But we've outperformed industrial production by a full two percentage points during the last two years, driven merchandise revenue growth ex-fuel in the mid-single-digit range. And in fact, over the last seven quarters, merchandise revenue ex-fuel has been up at least 4% year-over-year every quarter. The last time we did that was about a decade ago.
And if you'll remember, that was largely driven by crude by rail. We don't have such a phenomenon today. And yet, we're still delivering that performance. If we look at intermodal, it's been a challenging period for intermodal and trucking over the last five years. We had the pandemic. We had supply chain disruptions and hiring challenges that followed. We had inventory destocking that heavily impacted international last year. And then we've had port strikes this year in the East. Through all of that, CSX has grown our intermodal volume. And in fact, our volume has grown faster than the U.S. average and well ahead of our trucking peers. Maryclare outlined the opportunities that we have in front of us to continue on this path and deliver even more growth over the next few years. We get a lot of questions about price, particularly price versus inflation.
So what this chart is showing you is the difference in dollars of price that we've realized in merchandise and intermodal relative to cost inflation. It's been contributory for every single year on the chart. And what you'll see is that the last two years, the gap between price dollars and inflation dollars has been about as large as it's been in the last decade. There was a little bit of catch-up coming out of hyperinflation in 2022 and 2023. We do see inflationary pressure subsiding over the next couple of years. So price dollars may come down a little bit. But that dynamic between price and inflation will remain. And we think it's a key driver of bottom-line growth going forward over the next three years. But our operating income's down, right? Nearly $6 billion of operating income in 2022.
Over the last 12 months, we're down almost $500 million. You have to remember that in 2022, we were facing unprecedented times. The supply chain crisis led to an opportunity for CSX to collect record storage revenues. Export net pricing was at all-time highs. CSX was a big beneficiary of that. We also had high fuel prices, which was a net benefit, and real estate gains in 2022. All of that was over $900 million of operating income. If you were to do the math and adjust for it, you'd get to an operating income growth rate in the mid-single digits over this time period. You also have to remember that during this time, we were catching up on the hiring front coming out of COVID. Our headcount's up 8%, while our carload volume's only up 1%. We're turning that dynamic around.
In the third quarter, carload volumes were up 3%. And rail headcount was up just 1. That's the kind of headcount efficiency you can expect going forward, which will take that mid-single-digit operating income growth and make it even larger. So let's talk about the growth opportunity and look at the numbers on the slides. You heard a lot of the details from Kevin and the team, saw a lot of the numbers. But I'm going to put it in perspective for you. The three pieces of the revenue growth algorithm are here on the page. The first is economic growth with our existing customers. And this, I will tell you, is the smallest piece of the mid-single-digit revenue growth that we expect the next three years. We are hoping for, but not necessarily baking into our model, an economic recovery, rebounds in certain markets. We're optimistic about that.
But when we look at the projections, we've got industrial production at 1%. And we've got GDP at 2%. That's what's in our model. The biggest piece is modal conversions and industrial development. You heard a lot about that from the team. So I won't go into a lot of details. But just to reinforce, the pipeline of opportunities and the way that the commercial team is approaching the market is distinct. It's bigger than we've ever seen before. We talked about price just a minute ago. We expect price to continue to exceed inflation. It'll be a key driver. You can expect that mix will be slightly negative if you think about the numbers Kevin showed with coal flat and intermodal being our highest growing segment. We'll have a little bit of offset from mix.
You add all three of those pieces together, and you get to mid-single-digit revenue growth, and as you heard from Mike and Casey, we've got opportunities on the cost side to drive continued efficiency. I'm just going to go through a couple of the buckets here. There's more that aren't on the page. The first and one of the biggest is the amount of money we spend on our assets, $1.5 billion to support locomotives and freight cars, with over $1 billion of that being in OpEx. We talked about the Cumberland Project. We talked about the leveraging technology to optimize the network. The better we get at that, the more cost we can drive out on this side. That also helps with our fuel efficiency, as do the investments we're making in fuel technology and the process improvements that we're driving.
We're the best U.S. Class I railroad by a wide margin on fuel efficiency. We expect to continue to drive gains here. In fact, this year, we're on track to deliver $50 million of fuel efficiency in one year alone. I've got safety up here, right? Safety's not necessarily about the dollars. It's about bringing our employees home and keeping the communities where we operate safe. There is a direct cost when there are incidents out there, $200 million a year on injuries and accidents, let alone the impact that those incidents have on our network. The disruption when you have one of these incidents in a yard or on the line of road is significant and hard to quantify well beyond the $200 million that you see here. Investing in cultural transformation that drives safety improvements is critical.
And investing in the technology that helps to prevent these incidents is also important. I talked about headcount productivity, which we'll deliver over the next couple of years. But along with that are costs associated with the employees that we have today, inefficient labor costs like overtime and crew travel, nearly $500 million in that bucket. I'll just give you one example of an initiative we're working on this year to reduce labor claims. We have a lot of labor agreements out there. They've got a number of different things that employees can claim dollars for. And we didn't have a great process to understand what was driving some of those claims and figure out ways to reduce them. We got our payroll team and headquarters together with their transportation field team, those leaders out in the field, and figured out ways to reduce this spend.
We've delivered enough savings this year to essentially offset all the inflation within that $500 million bucket, over a 30% improvement in labor claims this year alone, and there's a lot of those opportunities here, and then discretionary spend. We're a big company, $1.5 billion of non-labor discretionary spend. It's been a big focus of us this year. In fact, we're tens of millions ahead of our plan in this line item, and we continue to look for ways to negotiate with suppliers, bring in new suppliers, think creatively about how we spend going forward to continue to drive efficiencies, so when we put that together, we say, well, what is growth going to mean in terms of bottom-line profit? What we're showing you here on the left side of the page is our cost structure. About 20% of that cost structure is fully variable.
That's fuel and trucking-related expenses. The biggest piece of that is our operations costs, which are semi-variable, 30%-50% variable. And that's because we have significant capacity in our assets. Our trains have room. Our terminals have space to continue to drive growth. And what you're seeing here is the fixed costs as a percent of the total has actually gone up over the years because of the efficiencies we've driven in our operating costs. So I used to be an analyst. And one of my jobs was to figure out what proportion each of these was and do the weighted average math. I'm going to do that for you. This gets you to a 50%-70% incremental margin, okay? That's what we expect over the next three years.
I want to emphasize the fact that when we say 50%-70% incremental margin, this is for all of the growth opportunities. There will be opportunities that, on a fully allocated basis, are at an all-in margin below the company average. But even on those opportunities, we expect incremental margins to be 50%-70% or greater. So this is the guidance, right? Volume growth, you heard it from Kevin and the team. It's going to be somewhere in that low to mid-single-digit range, which translates into mid-single-digit revenue growth. We've got capacity. We have efficiency initiatives. That's going to help us translate that mid-single-digit revenue growth into mid to high single-digit operating income growth. We'll continue to generate a lot of cash flow. We're going to invest that cash back into the network.
We're going to find strategic investments to put our dollars to work and earn a high return on it. And we'll continue to support shareholder distributions. Those distributions will help us to achieve an EPS growth in the high single-digit to low double-digit range over the three-year period. Now, it's not necessarily going to be a straight line up because, as I talked about last month on the quarter call, we do have some distinct challenges we'll face in 2025. Domestic coal will be a difficult year with a few utility closures. And more importantly, we've got some network disruption. So Hurricane Helene knocked out a portion of the network. We're rerouting around that. That's probably going to be into the first half of next year before we get that cleaned up. And we've got the Howard Street Tunnel Project.
We're going to get all of that done in a year, which is phenomenal. It's going to unlock value for us not only from a cost standpoint but also from a growth standpoint. But it's going to require reroutes. And it will be disruptive next year. So there'll be some costs associated with that. Merchandise will still outpace the economy. Intermodal will grow ahead of IDP. We'll price ahead of inflation. And we'll drive efficiency gains. But some of those items will offset it in 2025. Even with that, we're confident in these numbers over the three-year period. So let's talk about capital allocation. Since 2017, our company's delivered nearly $40 billion of operating cash flow. About half of that has been either reinvested into the business or spent on M&A to help grow our business. We'll continue that approach going forward.
And our intent is to try to invest more in strategic and growth-oriented projects. One of my key goals when I took over on this job was to find a pipeline, fill a pipeline of those growth opportunities, and find new investments that carry a high return. And I'm happy to report that we've tripled the amount of strategic capital we're spending versus just a couple of years ago. One of the things we did is we stood up an innovation team. You'll hear from that team and see some of the things they're working on on the train. And importantly, we've been working to increase psychological safety across the 23,000 employees that we have across our network. What that does is it allows those employees to speak up when they see something.
They were part of the solution on Cumberland, helping us to engineer that yard and bringing forth even more opportunities. We have an opportunity for all of our employees to submit ideas that we can then vet and look whether we can develop a business case and invest in those opportunities to develop high returns. Shareholder returns are also a key component. We've spent a lot of dollars on shareholder returns, and we'll continue to do that. I'll outline that in a few slides. Let's look just at capital investment to begin with here, so punchline is, over the next three years, the capital spend at CSX will be pretty similar to what it was in 2024, roughly $2.5 billion a year. Now, that does exclude the rebuild of the Hurricane Helene impacted area, our Blue Ridge Subdivision, which we'll carry into next year.
The biggest component of it is our maintenance capital. That'll continue to be the largest part of our capital spend. But we're getting a lot smarter about how we spend those maintenance dollars. We're leveraging a lot of technology. You've heard us talk about autonomous inspection cars. Those cars are gathering a tremendous amount of data. We're pairing that data with our visual inspections and the Sperry cars that are doing inspections. We're putting that together with machine vision data as we inspect our ties. We're using all of that and layering on artificial intelligence on top of it to help us understand where do we need to prioritize that capital spend to reduce rail break and tie issues. We're getting more efficient in the labor that's actually installing that rail and ties.
Over the last couple of years, our rail and tie labor is actually 35% more efficient on a per-hour basis than it was, helping to offset a lot of the inflation that we've seen in the material and labor costs. In terms of rolling stock, we don't see a need to invest in any new locomotives over the next three years to support the growth that we project. We have been investing in locomotive modernizations and will continue that at a similar pace to what we're doing this year. And we will have some freight car investments as well at a similar pace to what we did this year. Those investments will be both for fleets that are falling out that carry high returns, but also to support some of the industrial development projects you heard about from Christina. And then strategic capital.
We're spending money to support the growth of the Quality ISO tank containers, growth in our TRANSFLO terminals, investment in technology, and other high-return projects, and so that bucket will hopefully continue to grow, giving us that $7.5-$8 billion range over the next three years, and our network is in better shape than it's ever been. You heard that from Mike and Casey. You even heard it from the commercial team. We've got over $50 billion of gross assets on the balance sheet, and the track has gotten significantly more reliable. You see that in the nearly 50% reduction in track-caused derailments over the last several years. We've also got fewer assets on the network, so capacity to grow, and those assets are in better shape. We're modernizing locomotives. We've extended 16 sidings primarily in the southeastern part of the network, and you heard it from Mike before.
We're doing a couple of these projects here and there, but there's not a huge pent-up demand. There aren't significant areas of constraint where we need to extend siding length in order to accommodate growth and continued consolidation of cars onto trains. So the asset base is relatively fixed. As we grow operating income, that generates increasing economic profit, which drives value to you, the shareholder. So I want to take a minute to talk about capital allocation because our approach is a little bit different than our peers. We are an A-rated credit profile with a very strong balance sheet, but we also have significant financial flexibility as evidenced by this chart. What this is showing you is retained cash flow minus CapEx divided by debt. Higher is better. And CSX has been at or near the top over this time frame.
This is the amount of cash that we have left over after we've fully funded our capital and distributed the dividend. And so this gives us a lot of flexibility. It's evidence of our high margins. It's evidence of our capital discipline. And also, importantly, our dividend has grown over the last 20 years, but our dividend payout ratio is lower than our peers. That gives us the flexibility to invest in growth-oriented projects and also says, "Hey, when we're in periods of financial stress or we've got challenges that we're facing, we can continue to invest in the network to set us up for the future. We can go after opportunities that our peers can't. And we can continue to support shareholder returns even in challenging times." And that's what we've done, right? The dividend's gone up every year. It's been 20 consecutive years.
And we've got a board that supports continued modest increases in the dividend going forward. On the share repurchase program, we've described our approach as opportunistic. And you see the evidence of that here on the page. Since 2017, we've bought back over 30% of our shares at an average price less than $26. That's a 5% discount to the average trading price. So we're beating it by timing, but we're also beating it by execution within each year. That's generated a return for ongoing shareholders of nearly 45%. After the election results, over 50% now, but very strong return for ongoing shareholders. And we expect to continue this approach going forward as we generate more cash. So I'm going to close with this, right? We have got a proven operating model. We're best in class when it comes to railroad operations. It's in our DNA.
We've got a lot of momentum at CSX. You've seen that in some of the customer testimonies you've heard. You've heard it from our employees, those that you've interacted with. You're going to hear it when you go out in the field. The team is excited about where we're headed. My job was to translate that momentum and show you how that was going to build an equation for profitable growth. My intent has been to do that. We are excited as a team now to deliver on those commitments. What we're going to do is we're going to take a five-minute stretch break here. If you do need to exit, come back promptly because Q&A will begin in precisely five minutes.
You got to get more efficient to pay for them. Don't worry.
That's the goal. All right. So far, so good.
We're doing quite well with time. So we appreciate everybody. This is a cooperative effort, and you're doing great. At this point, we've got a little while, I'm sure. Look, you're already seeing the hands raised. We do have about 20-something minutes to ask questions. You've all seen a lot of content this morning. We have a couple of runners around here in the room with microphones. And so we'll go right through it. And so I'm going to go right to my friend, Mr. Chappell. Please use mic so that people on the video can hear. Yes. And if you would, please announce your name and where your affiliation. Thank you.
Thank you. Jon Chappell, Evercore ISI. Kevin, mine's for you. Your takeaway chart on the IP + 1% to 2%, the GDP + 2% to 3%. I understand we're talking about three-year time horizons here.
You kind of gave the view that a lot of the investment was done. You're kind of ready to reap the benefits of this. But is this something that happens in 2025, or is there a three-year runway where it kind of continues to ramp? And I know it's all above the macro, but do you need a little bit of macro tailwind to kind of achieve these targets that you've laid out?
Yeah. I think I did split the growth into two factors. Obviously, the economy does matter for our business. And some of the businesses we do serve are cyclical. And quite frankly, they're probably facing a lot of headwinds currently. So I do think that's an opportunity. We're not baking it into necessarily our three-year forecast, but I think that's a likely scenario that some of these markets rebound.
But when we add it up, I would say from an industrial development side, we certainly expect that to ramp. Because if you think about a facility that comes online, even if it's in first quarter of 2025, there's generally a 12 to 18-month ramp in production to get up to that full rate. And so we do think that accelerates. The other initiatives, we absolutely expect growth next year. And we see the pipeline of opportunities that start in 2025. But I would say the nuances on the industrial development side, that will accelerate in 2025 to 2026 to 2027.
All right. Let's go over here. Mr. Kaufman here.
Thank you very much. Jeff Kauffman, Vertical Research Partners. Question for Sean. I'm going to use an election analogy here, right?
You got your core states where you're pretty sure you're going to win, then you got your swing states where you're hoping for a good outcome. If I look at the key elements of your forecast, what parts of it are core and what parts are swing s tate?
Good question, man. Yeah. And can you win all the swing states?
Look, I mean, I don't know. There's a whole lot of swing states. I think we feel pretty confident across every aspect of the forecast, right? We can't control the economy. But at the same time, as Kevin just said, and I talked about in my part as well, we're not banking on significant economic growth in order to meet our numbers. So look, if the economy is kind of what it's been the last couple of years, that's supportive. Pricing gains, we keep a close eye on that.
Obviously, the team's out there selling. The service product helps with that. Mike and Kevin being joined at the hip with our customers helps with that. There's trade-offs you make, but we track that every week, every month. And that'll continue to be a key driver. And then the incremental margins, they're there. The capacity is there. And all you need to do is talk with Mike a few minutes. There's opportunity out there, right? So there's cost to be had. The cash flow will get generated. We feel good about our ability to hit the capital numbers. We think that level of spend is going to be what we need in order to support the growth. And that's going to generate a lot of leftover cash that we can invest and get back to you, the shareholders.
So I think we feel good about each of the components of it.
Let's see. Oh, goodness here. Let's go right here in the front row again. Mr. Wadewitz.
Great. Thank you. So I wanted to see if you could offer some thoughts on kind of quality of the new business that you get. Inherently, if you're taking truck business, you'd think, well, trucks are better at shorter length of haul. So it could be that the more natural incremental business you get might be shorter length of haul. So just wanted to see if you could offer some thoughts about that. Is that something we should consider as you take more share from the market over time? And then one for Mike in terms of how you think about the network and frequency versus length of trains.
So you run longer trains, that's better, but maybe the customer doesn't see as much in frequency. So I know a lot of times things go the same way. You help the customer, you help CSX. But how do you think about changing the network to kind of reduce frequency, increase train length, and how that kind of could affect the customer? Thank you.
Yeah. I'll go first. When you see our industrial development pipeline, it's in very attractive industries when you think about metals and others. So I think that's very much a positive mix for our business. When you think about potential truck conversion, I think it runs the gamut. Some of it's shorter length of haul, which is on the inland ports that Maryclare talked about on the intermodal side. That's a very good business for us.
So maybe the RPU doesn't show up at the levels at the average business, but it's a very, very profitable business because we can do it very, very efficiently from an operating perspective. So as Sean and we highlighted, this is not going after a business that has a lower margin profile for us across the portfolio. And there's a lot of opportunities in our most key markets. When I talk about what we're doing on the chemical side with Quality Carriers and TRANSFLO, that's business you want to bring onto the network. And traditionally, we haven't had the opportunities in those segments like we do going forward. So I don't think anything fundamentally changes with our mix in terms of the new business we're bringing on.
Yeah. And Tom, when you talk about it's not so much train size. We start with the customer, always looking for efficiency.
So yes, I'd like to have one train out there if we could do it. But obviously, that doesn't work. But seriously, it starts with the customer. And that's where Kevin could speak a little bit to it. When I first came, one of the first things I wanted to make sure we weren't doing was just throwing a service out there and customers not really getting as much as or we weren't getting as much out of what we were putting in as what was there to have. And so we did reduce service. And it affects it well. But we really stay close with the customer so that they can accept that's the service that they can handle and that they need. But we're always looking to minimize the amount of activity in our railroad, whether it's in yards, whether it's on the main line.
So we don't want a lot of different separate activities going to separate little points on our network. We want to create mass, which then takes the noise, the exposures that are out there, takes it out. So yes, bigger, less of them. But really, first, it starts with the customer. What do they need? And we find when we work that way, customers are more than happy to work with us, change some of their processes. And then the last piece to it is when we're not right about it, we change it back right away. We don't like multiple failures. We don't get stubborn that our plan to get efficiency is the way to go. If that doesn't work for the customer, we go back to the drawing board. And it's hard work, but that's what we're teaching everybody to do because that's where the value is. Yeah.
I mean, the difference has been really the communication when these opportunities, when Casey and team and Mike are coming up with changes to the train plan, we're communicating and we're getting in front of it. Does it impact the customer? And 90% of the time, very, very little impact to the customer. In fact, a lot of times it actually is helpful from that area. But when it does, we stop. We listen. That's number one. Rule number one. You'll get more from Chantel and Shannon on the train that talks about it. But really, that's extremely important to us and to the customer.
So a question over here, Mr. Seidl.
Thank you. First of all, Matt Sandy and the rest of the CSX team, thanks for hosting all of us here. This is going to be for sort of Casey and Mike.
You guys did a great job with the Cumberland reconfiguration here. You mentioned that was, I think, $15 million in direct savings. But then you said, "Hey, we have eight additional facility reconfigurations coming up." Can you give us some numbers around that in terms of what you think the total potential direct savings is? And then is that number in the longer-term guidance that Sean gave us?
I think it's no and no. So Jason, really, really what my focus has been on is learning the business, learning the network. And then at the same time, there's a wealth of knowledge at this railway. So you can ask them. I have a posse. Anybody that can come comes with me. And we found these eight of there's probably 40 places. These are just the start.
They really reflect where we either find we have a pinch point, a bottleneck, or in the case of Livonia, where that automotive network is so important to us. We have an opportunity to just not just build resiliency into it, but speed it up. Those are the eight things we're looking at. Something as simple as in Indianapolis, we have a hump yard. We have a 6,000-foot pullback track. The tracks coming in, the trains coming in are 8,000 feet. Every time we go to pull a track to hump, there's 2,000 feet sitting. It's an extra exposure. It's an extra step. Guess what? Extend the pullback. I know it's not rocket science, but it has to be part of an integrated plan that grows with Kevin and his team, with Christina and Maryclare and Arthur. It's extremely integrated.
We're not projecting anything yet in terms of back over to second question, Sean. You can go ahead, Sean. But these are great opportunities that we just see over and above. They spiral into other opportunities. Sorry, I'm going to take a minute here. At Cumberland, we did that work. We did that work. Then in subsequent visits, we were there a few weeks ago, and we brought the whole team in, and we talked about, "Okay, what have we learned? What can we do different? What do we have to do still?" It came to bear that we were storing locomotives in a yard in Cumberland that we've now made adjacent to this one, and we've increased the blocking even more by moving the storage locomotives.
It sounds simple, but when you bring people together and you include them and you allow them to say what they think, wow. Why were they storing them there? They were storing them there because they were afraid someone was going to rip the track up. And even more, we relaid it three years before. It's brand new rail. I'm not saying it's everywhere, but there's a multitude of opportunities. And we will not do something unless it makes sense. So we have the eight opportunities. We're going to do them in line when we need to do them as well. So it's a step approach.
I had him highlight the extra point because all this stuff fits together, and it's so critically important. The on-site visit with everybody involved and creating a space, an environment, a culture where people are part of the solution and they work together.
And then they raise their hand and say, "Oh, by the way, what if we did this?" And we didn't even know about it. And they were hiding it because they were worried that someone was going to come in because of what had happened in the past. Those are out there. I will say, for Sean's sake, Cumberland is a more exemplary example of opportunity because of the out-of-route miles opportunity. I wouldn't take 15 times 8 because of just the extraordinary notion of that out-of-route. But as Mike said, there's a lot more. There's a lot more. There's a lot more.
Yeah. Mr. Wetherbee here in the front.
Hey, thanks. Chris Wetherbee from Wells Fargo. I guess maybe a couple of questions for Sean.
So, I guess first, when you talked about the next couple of years from an EPS perspective, I guess there was a couple of headwinds that you were highlighting for 2025. So, I just want to get a sense of 2025 inside of the range of growth that you're talking about for all the metrics. I guess that'd be the first question. And then the second one is you outlined some of the opportunities for efficiencies and cost and asset utilization, fuel efficiency, those kinds of things. Is there a way to put a certain number around what's capable, sort of absent the volume opportunity or the macro opportunity? I know they go hand in hand because a lot of it is productivity. But is there any way you could kind of put some numbers around that that'd be helpful?
Yeah.
I mean, we're not going to break out the year by year, and clearly, we're still putting our plans together for 2025, so I don't want to give you any kind of specific 2025 guidance, but when you think about the three years, the growth in 2026 and 2027 is going to be higher than what we would expect for 2025 because of some of the things I outlined, and then in terms of opportunities, there's plenty out there. I think the way that we think about it when we're building the plan is, here's the amount of cost inflation that we expect to have. Let's build up the pipeline that offsets most, if not all of that cost inflation. There'll be some years where we get fully there. There's some years we're a little bit below, but we've got the price to offset it as well.
Question up here.
Shanker here in the front.
Thank you. Ravi Shanker, Morgan Stanley. Two questions. One for you, Kevin. Can you just talk about the mix of inland port and how does that opportunity compare with domestic and international intermodal mix? And one for you, Sean. How do we think about how much pricing you need to be accretive to margins net of inflation an d mix? Thank you.
Yeah. I think from a profitability standpoint, as I mentioned before, I use it as an example, we can do it very, very efficiently, moving it from the port into these. It's shorter length of haul. So your RPU might be a little bit below the average of the international side and even, obviously, on the domestic side. So there is a mix factor in that, but at a very profitable level that we can deliver it.
We also have, obviously, a lot of opportunities on the domestic side to continue to grow that business, as Maryclare pointed out as well. Yeah. And we get a lot of questions about pricing being accretive to margins. It's just not really how we think about it. If we can price ahead of inflation, it's going to be a driver of bottom line growth. And we think that that's going to be maybe a couple of points a year towards mid to high single-digit operating income growth. So some years it may be a little bit accretive. Some years may be a little bit below that, but not meaningfully. So I think, and I'm sure there's a margin question out there, so I'll just go ahead and hit it, right? You all can do the math. We did not put a specific margin target out there.
But obviously, if you follow the logic of everything I laid out, you're going to do the math, and you'll see that margins will improve over this timeframe. We don't have a specific destination that we're headed towards, right? Because I think part of the reason we changed from OR focus to talk about the nomenclature of margins is getting people focused on growing the business, doing it profitably, driving efficiency. That's going to result in higher margins. And that's part of the model, just not something we're going to put a specific number around.
Mr. Vernon here in the front.
Hi. David Vernon with Bernstein. Thanks again for hosting us today. So Kevin, we talked a lot about industrial development as being a big driver of incremental growth, big carload potential opportunities in the pipeline.
How do we think about the incremental impact into what we should actually be putting in a model a couple of years out? Because I know there's always some amount of attrition year to year. Can you just help us think about what that baseline level of attrition is and how much of that gross opportunity could actually come into the network on an incremental basis?
Yeah. I think when Christina was going through her slide, you may not have caught it, but what she said when it was one to two points of incremental growth, particularly on the merchandise side, that's a net number that we expect. So typically, I think we've seen over time some of that slowing down now is 50 to 100 basis points of basically headwind that we go into every year, given some of the, obviously, offshoring and those dynamics that have taken place.
We do expect that to come down. Obviously, taxes, all those things are factors in that equation. But we do think that degradation is going to come down. And then we're at a huge pipeline of opportunities on top of that. So net net, one to two basis points. And then we expect that to accelerate over the next couple of years.
Garrett, back in this back row, please.
Garrett Holland with Baird. Thanks for having us. I'd be interested to hear more about the collaboration between sales and marketing and operations. Clearly, these are some pretty ambitious growth forecasts. From the operation side, how do you underwrite that, especially with a focus potentially to take more resources out of the network? I'd be interested in hearing more about that collaboration.
It started when I got here. I stayed at Kevin's house for three months. So I know some of you.
Got to start right at the ground floor. But our operations team is lucky that we have a really good, diverse book of business. And we have a stable railway. So it's allowed us to take the time to really take part in what Kevin and the team are out there doing. And so we understand it from the customer's view. And we can take that back. And it's not about just taking out assets, just more efficiently using them. And so we spend an awful lot of time at each level working with each other. But I find it old hat. That's what I was used to. This is how you run these companies. I mean, we're a service provider. So that's second nature to what I think.
So I'm probably bugging Kevin more often than he's used to about what is it we're doing, what are we trying to do. And then we're really integrating our teams together. We have some serious you're going to get on a business card today that we'll take a trip, and we'll spend 12, 14 hours, a collective group of people every day in this car you're going to have lunch in. And it's a real office car. And that's where we've come up with many of the things you saw today, talking about them, sharing the ideas, but really leveraging everybody's expertise and creating one common goal. That's to serve the customer, create the value we know that's there, and return it to the people that support us. And so there's no plot or chart for it. It's just how you do business.
I mean, I'm having more fun than I have at CSX. And a lot of it's because of just Mike and being able to interact with him every day. And we don't always agree on everything, but we can come to a solution. And he listens, and we can figure out what's best for the customer. And sometimes the revenue doesn't make sense for our network. And we can agree that it doesn't make sense. The cost factors are, we're not going to go after business that doesn't make sense for the network and that could impact negatively other customers. But having that communication channel, it starts with us. But I can tell you, and feel free to talk to the team today, the amount of collaboration that's occurring with Casey's team between Arthur and Maryclare, it makes a difference. It really does.
Because we have to find these solutions very quickly. And if you're wasting time and taking months to make these decisions, the customer's already moved along. And that's where I've just seen a dramatic change in our ability to react very, very quickly. And sometimes the answer is no to customers, and that's fine. But let's get to that answer quickly. We act as filters. But at the same time, if he comes to me and says, "We need to do it," we do it. He represents the customer better than anybody at the company, he and his team. So that works. And I don't forget my old role. I want to do a very profitable. He's also got a finance background, so that helps.
Thank God. Mr. Oglenski here in the back, please.
Good morning. Brandon Oglenski from Barclays. Thanks for having us down here.
Sean, maybe if I can just ask you another way for 2025. You did mention three things: the tunnel expansion, I think the hurricane impact, as well as lower domestic coal. Can you just quantify any of those for us? And then, Joe, maybe longer term here, you guys have definitely departed from conference negotiations with your unions. What have been the initial benefits that you've gotten out of these new agreements that you've been kind of leading here? Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, it's a little too early for me to give you specific quantification around each of those because they're a bit of a moving target, right? We're still honing some estimates. And look, there's some things we're doing to try to reduce the cost of the reroutes and do it smarter and cheaper. So they're big enough that they're worth mentioning.
But we'll give you more details on that in a couple of months.
I think on the union side, just quickly, there's so many ways to address this and talk about it. So I'll try to be quick. I mean, first of all, I can tell you without hesitation that the most disappointing thing that affected our employees in the last couple of years was how the last round of negotiations went. When I'm out in the field every week, Mike and the team, that made our employees feel devalued, not important, not part of the team, all these things. Took three years, didn't get a raise, had to fight for it, had to go to Congress, all those things. So just the fact that we've been able to get in front of it is just such a different environment. And our people appreciate it.
They mention it to me when we're out. They appreciate it. They always want more, especially with all the noise going on around things. But they understand that we're working hard to find solutions, and we're doing it collaboratively and together. All the railroads are in different places. And that's what makes coalition bargaining very difficult. We're all in different places. Starting points are different, and the contracts are different. And that, I think, is largely misunderstood by a lot of people. And so we may have a unique issue with SMART-TD, and someone else may need to have a unique issue with BLET, and someone else with BRS or BMWED. And so it's challenging. But I'm really encouraged by the pattern that's been established, for lack of a better term, with Norfolk Southern and BNSF coming along. And I think we've got a good baseline.
Importantly, our union partners want to work with us to find solutions. And our belief is that we get the national type things behind us, wages, benefits, vacation, those kind of things, and we can spend the next five years working on the things that make this railroad safer, more efficient, and better for the customers, and then profitably grow. And our employees want that. They really do. I mean, they certainly want a better, safer environment. They want to serve customers. No one comes in today saying, "Oh, I don't want to serve the customer." And they certainly want it to be more efficient. They have their own views on what efficiency looks like, work-life balance, scheduling. So their vantage point is different. But we weave that together. But we have to create the time and energy and relationship to work on that.
And if you're always fighting over national negotiations, you don't get into that. And you don't get the time and energy and the relationship to work that. So really important. It's all part of what you're hearing here. I think we're wrapping up. So I guess I'll transition because we want to make sure we stay on time. I'm sorry we didn't get to everybody's question. But we're going to be together, for those of you that are here, for the next several hours. So please grab us. I'll stay seated because there's no reason to kind of preach. When you think about the environment that we're in, and I'll take that.
When you think about where we are, and I think this team's done a great job of showing you not only the journey we've been on, and I think the CSX team deserves tremendous credit for that journey. It wasn't a straight line, and it wasn't easy. What we've accomplished in the two years I've been here, and the potential of this business is amazing. That's why it gets us so excited. There's so many more components of this that I want to highlight. When I started 25 months ago, and I remember Matthew and I were sitting down and talking about we're going to talk to customers, sorry, we're going to talk to investors and the analysts. Then we set up a big strategy. You can see I've talked to a lot of customers.
We said we're going to focus on our employee culture, the employee engagement, to lead to better customer service. That comes from someone like myself who had been on the other side of this relationship for decades and, frankly, didn't feel like the railroads provided the kind of service we deserved and, frankly, didn't prioritize us. Okay. And we talked about the interplay between you can't create the service. Mike said it several times, and I love hearing it, that we're a service business. You can't create the service that we expect and our customers deserve without having your employees engaged part of the solution and wanting to do that and motivated to do that. We've added safety to that because, of course, we've had some fatalities and, also importantly, what's happened in our industry. They're all related.
But I want to go back to where Sean took us, which is we've delivered. We have a proven model. It's getting better. And we have the team to make it even better and to do what we said. Now, the team today wanted to lay out the vision that we see, not in a five, 10-year horizon, three years. That's within planning time frame. And that's without major changes to the economy doable from what we see the lens we have into the business. It's very exciting. And it's a big opportunity. And we're highly motivated by, as you can see. But let me just describe this to you. One of the joys of this job for me is that I get to kind of be the coach.
When you have talented teams, talented players, your job as a coach is to put them in the right positions, make sure they're a team, they're working well together, and you have the right strategy and the right plan to win. We have a talented team. Most of those people were here when I got here. 90% of our VPs and above were here when I got here. All right? We brought some operating people in. We're really glad Mike joined us and some others in the operations side. But this is the team that's been together for quite some time and has learned a lot and has been through a lot and delivered the results that Sean said. You can have faith and confidence in this team. You can also have faith and confidence that this team is working extremely well together. You can't fake that.
Having worked 10 years at General Motors, 19 years at Ford, a couple of years in private equity, two years now at CSX, been on several boards, that is the magic. Talented people working together, motivated to deliver the same goals, that's what you try to strive to achieve. That's where the power comes in. We have the same locomotives as other railroads. We have the same steel. We have the same ties. We have the same unions, all the above. What's the difference of CSX? It's the operating model, the track record of success, the team, and how we work together, and, importantly, the culture that we're establishing.
And what we said two years ago, our stretch goal, the stretch goal at the time, because my first day on the job, we had a town hall, and I said, "I have to tell you guys and ladies," a generic term, "I got to tell you, most of our customers are doing business with rail because they have to, not because they want to. What if we could create customer advocacy for rail? What if we could treat customers in a way that they want to use rail because they should use rail? There's all kinds of reasons, economic reasons, environmental reasons, safety reasons, all kinds of business reasons why they should. But we treated them so poorly, they couldn't count on us. They had to go somewhere else, even though it wasn't as good a business for them.
So what if we create an environment at CSX where we're all here to serve the customer? How many times have you heard it come from Casey and Mike's words? They're the operating guys. But if we create an environment where we are focused on serving the customer, doing that efficiently and safely, there's good business reasons why customers should do more business with rail. We already have that. We're lower cost. We're better for the environment. We're better for the taxpayer. We're better for congestion. We're better for all these things. It takes us working together to be motivated every day to serve that customer. And you can't do that if your employees aren't part of that, if they don't feel empowered to be a part of that, if they don't feel valued, appreciated, respected, included, and listened to. That's why 1CSX is so important.
Positive energy and teamwork is infectious. It creates energy. It creates opportunity. It delivers great results. That's what differentiates CSX. We didn't have to ask these customers to say we could have had 24 more customers come up here because they want CSX to be successful. They want railroads to be successful. I say it all the time. People love trains. They don't love railroads. We can make them love railroads by how we treat people and how we, because we're such an important part of the economy. That's the higher purpose. You can get people motivated to do that. When your higher purpose is that, safety, customer service, efficiency, and you come into work every day working together to serve a customer and profitably grow that business, who can't get behind that? We share that with our employees, with our shareholders. Everybody wins.
Sounds really great. Hard to do. Mike and I have the benefit of having retired. When you retire for a couple of years, you get to reflect on life a little bit, and you get to think about, "What would I do differently next time?" and you also get to say, "Man, if I'm going to do something, I know we're going to do it right this time." This is fun. Not easy every day. I don't like hurricanes, and things are going to happen, but this team's amazing. This team is working together. Kevin, you said it. No.
I moved Kevin in Mike's office down right next to mine, so we get a lot of quality time together when Mike came. And it's so much fun. And the energy that comes from everybody wearing a CSX shirt. And he was like, "Joe, why is everybody wearing a CSX shirt? Why do you do that all the time?" Because we're on the same team. And we're proud to be on that same team. And we're winning. And we're going to keep winning because we support each other. We care about each other. And we're here to serve the customer. That's why businesses exist. And then the shareholders get returns by serving the customer well and doing that in a way that provides returns over your cost structure. We can do that. So I'll leave you with that. There's so much opportunity still in this railroad.
We have a phenomenal team. It is everybody. I appreciate Railway Age naming a railroad of the year, but CSX is the Railroad of the Year. That's how we think about it. It's everybody. When we get 23,000 people working together with the 1CSX culture, we can do more than what you see on here. If we're not in double digit, I'm getting in trouble here.
Yeah, don't double digit.
If we're not in double digit EPS growth, that would be disappointing because of the potential of this business. And so what an opportunity that we have. And so we wanted to share that with you. And we're creating customer advocacy. ADM does more business with CSX than it's physically connected to. And we talked about that last night. WestRock did a longer-term contract with us because of the relationship. These are the kinds of things that are part of that advocacy. And that's what these teams are doing. And that's what we're committed to doing. And it's a phenomenal opportunity for growth. And it's easier to say now than it was two days ago. But I was going to say, with all of this, why in the world do we have the lowest multiple in our industry?
But the last couple of days helped correct a little bit of that. But seriously, we have growth potential, undeniable. We have a great track record, undeniable. We have a great team. I hope you believe that. I'm not going to say it's undeniable because that's not for me to say. And we're working well together. And we're delivering. So what an opportunity. I'm excited about it. Wake up every day. And I'm proud to work with this team. I'm excited about what we can do. And we never take, for those of the investors in the room or on the webcast, we never take your investment for granted. We appreciate it. We respect it. We cherish it. We're stewards of your capital and this franchise that we get to lead. We take it very seriously. But we want to do it the right way. Make it sustainable.
There's a reason why we haven't grown in this industry. It's because we didn't get customer advocacy because we didn't treat customers as the valued customers that they are. We are doing that at CSX. And we're going to keep doing that. And we'll do it efficiently. One of the best things about this business that I've learned is the only way you can serve your customers better is if you get more efficient in the network. They're not in conflict. Yeah, sure, you could add a bunch of short trains and small trains. But that's not efficient. But it gums the network up. And frankly, then you've got this problem with the network. So the best way to do that is how we're doing it so they're not in conflict. Yeah, I think you've seen that. What an opportunity we have. We're excited about it. We're glad you're here.
We're glad you joined us. And we look forward to what we can show you in the next three years. Okay? Let's go on a train ride.
Thank you.
All right? Thanks.