All right. We're going to go ahead and get started with our next fireside chat. I'm Justin Long with Stephens for those that haven't met me. Excited to have Norfolk Southern back with us in Nashville here today. Representing the company are Alan Shaw, CEO; Mark George, CFO; and then Luke Nichols with Investor Relations. Alan, Mark, Luke, thanks again for being here. This will be a fireside chat format. I'll start with a few questions and then open it up to investors in the room. Maybe, Alan, could you just get things kicked off with a quarter-to-date update on the business, how things are tracking relative to your expectations, and just any kind of bigger picture levels of outperformance or underperformance that you're seeing?
Yeah, our volume—first of all, are you going to be able to start a fire? It's cold in here.
I'm working on it.
Our volumes for the quarter are averaging about 134,000 a week. That's up from about 131,000, as you know, in the third quarter. It's pretty flat with last year, and ultimately we expect to be flat with last year in terms of weekly volumes, which means we'll exceed normal seasonality in our fourth quarter volumes. I think what's really important for us is our service product. When I was here—I think it was last December, December 1, right?
That's right. Early December.
I made it really clear that our clear objective and our number one priority was to restore our service product. We have been purposeful, and we have been intentional about doing that. For us, I have been clear, it is about resources, it is about plan, and it is about leadership. We are staffing up. We have implemented TOP SBG, which is Norfolk Southern's modern PSR operating plan. We have put in a leadership team that is intently focused on building a plan, continual improvement to the plan, which is a key component of PSR, and executing the plan. That has given us a lift in our volumes and our ability to compete. We are pretty confident in where we are headed.
Okay. Great. It sounds like fourth quarter you had talked about volumes being flat year over year. That's still the expectation?
Yeah, it is. We're seeing strength in, in a couple markets. Some of the industrial markets that we serve, in energy markets, and in food products. Our bulk network is running extremely well right now, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. Our intermodal franchise, which faces the consumer, is seeing a slowdown in growth in consumer activity. It's still, it's still growing, or it's still steady. In fact, I think Walmart had pretty good results earlier this morning, which would kind of support that. What we're seeing, though, in those—that consumer-oriented market is a headwind associated with really loose truck capacity. We go through this quite a bit, you know, over cycles, and you'll see that probably play out as excess capacity comes out of the market, either because spot rates are so low or, you know, the smaller truckers get acquired by larger truckers.
Okay. I guess, Mark, shifting to you from a cost perspective, the guidance implied a roughly 62% OR, similar to what you saw in the first three quarters, I guess, in the fourth quarter. Is that still your expectation? Would you say things have kind of played out in line?
Yeah, I mean, as I touched upon on the earnings call, you know, fuel was going to start to become a little bit more of a headwind again here in the fourth quarter, and that's actually building on us, even more than what we thought. I think, you know, generally speaking, it's going to be in the ballpark, but there are additional pressures. Look, these are the perils of issuing quarterly guidance as stuff happens within the quarter. You know, fuel certainly is mounting as an additional pressure for us. You know, the way the lag works, we won't get the benefit on the surcharge side until Q1, but you'll, we'll have to absorb the cost here in the fourth quarter.
Okay. That, that's really more of a timing issue.
Correct.
If you set fuel aside, operationally, you would say things are in line?
Yeah. Operationally, everything else probably in line. The only other thing I would mention, it's always hard to predict in a quarter, like we saw last quarter where we called out a positive, favorable legal settlement in the quarter. You always have non-recurring items that may pop in or out, and they could go one way or the other. Those things, you know, can't predict right now for the fourth quarter if there's anything, but we will call them out.
Real estate is a good example of that.
Yeah, real estate, you know, the timing in which deals close, sometimes they come as planned, sometimes they slip. That is another item that, again, at this point, it is hard to predict. Generally, the rest of the operations and the operational costs, top line, things are tracking.
You know, Justin and Mark does a really good job of reconciling that, calling that out on the earnings call. We will continue to be really transparent there with the core momentum that we built, is in line with what we had targeted and what we had said we were going to deliver in the fourth quarter.
Good. On the real estate point, were you baking in any real estate gains in the fourth quarter?
Oh yeah, just the normal, usual real estate gains that we had in the quarter. You never know if $5 million, $10 million, $15 million of it slides out, depending on a deal or two, the timing of a deal or two, and when a buyer gets their funds, etc., etc. Yeah, we had, we have real estate in the quarter.
Nothing irregular?
Nothing irregular. Nothing big like we called out a year ago in, in the second quarter, I think it was. One other thing I will mention, and you'll see it on the, on the website, we did post some slides in the quarter. And, you know, there's a couple of slides, and I think, you know, Alan can maybe you can, you can talk to the, some of the changes we've seen in our hiring locations. There's a new slide there that actually details a little bit more on the 95 hiring locations we have and the progress we're making on, on those. There is another slide I put in at the end because we had a lot of questions after the call on the labor cost impact that we recorded in the third quarter and how much of that was associated by prior period.
You'll recall we had, in that third quarter, we said $88 million of that was kind of out of period. There were some questions about the modeling as it comes to the full year, and you need to remember that only $56 million was really out of period for 2022 because the balance really was associated with the first half of, first half of 2022. We just wanted to get that out there for clarification. Okay?
Okay. Yeah. Mark brings up a good point. We have posted some slides out on our website. We're going to make some forward-looking statements today. Actual results may vary. I'd invite your listeners, Justin, to go take a look at the slides, and also go take a look at our website and SEC filings for a better indication of the risks and uncertainties and our risk factors.
Got it. We'll definitely take a look at those slides.
Yeah.
One of the questions I've asked the first two rails in these fireside chats has been around the ongoing labor negotiations. You know, we're seeing new developments every day. What are your latest thoughts on the probability of a deal getting finalized and, you know, if not, where we go from there?
We're going to get resolution to this. I'm fully confident of that. You know, seven of our 12 labor unions have already ratified this. The labor union leaders of all 12 of those unions have inked those deals. We've got two more unions that are voting, the BLET and SMART TD. We'll see the results of that on the 21st. You know, we're engaged; we continue to be engaged with the labor union leaders. I've talked to them myself. We continue to be engaged with our key congressional allies, and we continue to be engaged with the administration. I have full faith and confidence we'll get this resolved.
Without Congress intervening?
Congress may very well have to intervene.
Okay. Are you doing anything to prepare for a potential strike at this point? I mean, I know there were some actions taken back in September. You know, what's your thought process around that?
Right now, the earliest that a strike could occur would be on December 4th, right? Norfolk Southern, consistent with our no-surprises approach to operating our railroad in September, came out about a week to 10 days in advance, alerted our customers there's a potential for a strike and that as we got closer to that potential strike date, we would have to be making some alterations to our network to ensure the safety of our customers' product and the safety of the communities that we serve. We're not anywhere close to that yet, but if we approach December 4th, and it doesn't look like we're going to have a resolution, we'll be sure to communicate with our customers.
Understood. I will open it up to the audience for any questions. I will try to repeat the question, so the webcast catches it. Ted?
Alan, the first two railroads spoke a lot about sustainability, and, frankly, I think, you know, you guys are probably further ahead than most in that you've actually kind of figured out how to meld it around the commercial strategy as well. Perhaps you might provide an update on that?
The question was on sustainability and melding that with the commercialization strategy and an update there.
Yeah, I'll look, I'll agree with you. I think we're a leader in this space. We were the first to have a Chief Sustainability Officer. We were first to have a Carbon Calculator on our website. I'm sure you remember the green machine. It was rudimentary, but it was there. We rolled out a very detailed Carbon Calculator earlier this year. About 40 of our top 200 customers have announced carbon reduction targets. More importantly, many of our customers' customers are very interested in sustainability as well. You know, our whole focus is on securing business from the highway. We've got the franchise that's built to do that. We've got the franchise that's situated in the eastern half of the United States that can do that.
We are very purposeful, very intentional on using sustainability as another value component of our value proposition to take business off the highway. We are engaged with our customers on that discussion right now. A couple of years ago, it was a nice to have. I think now what we are seeing is our customers' sustainability officers are linked with our customers' logistics officers and part of that conversation.
It also seems they're linked with their CFOs in that they're now saying, "Hey, you know, sustainability is nice, but show me the money with the carbon offsets and the carbon credits.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
I know, I know Josh has, you know, been, been doing a lot, but you guys seem further ahead. What is that? What's the opportunity for the rail industry, you know, to monetize this previously totally untapped source of income?
He, you referenced Josh. Josh is our Chief Sustainability Officer. Obviously, what you're seeing is the fact that our Chief Sustainability Officer and our marketing team are closely linked on this thing. It is another sales tool for us. As the cost of carbon offsets continues to go up, because more and more companies make commitments to be carbon neutral or carbon abatement plans, it's going to create more opportunity, more value for that highway to rail conversion.
You know, there was an announcement this week about Paul Duncan becoming COO. I meant to ask about that earlier. Could you just talk about the timing of that announcement? You know, why is it the right time to make a change now? How does this change the operational strategy for Norfolk going forward, if at all?
Yeah, you know, we're real excited to have an investor day coming up in about three weeks. We're going to sit down with the investment community, and we're going to lay out our vision for long-term shareholder creation based on being a customer-centric, operations-driven service organization. That means striking that right balance between service, productivity, and growth. We've made great strides in our service product this year. We told you we were going to do it, and we've delivered on it. We have more to go. As I think about this as we move into next year, it really is a good opportunity for Paul's leadership in our operations department. We've had him within our group and within our team since March. We've been able to see him operate. We've been able to see him collaborate.
We've been able to understand what his values are. More importantly, we've been able to see the results, and you have too, right? Our results are measured every week with train speed and terminal dwell and on-time performance that we post for the Service Transportation Board. He's delivering results, and he's the right leader for us going forward.
Great. I guess looking ahead to that December 6th investor day, anything else in terms of the table of contents that you can share without getting into the details on, you know, high level what you're wanting to address?
I think as I look at our franchise, we have a franchise that's built for growth, right? We've got, we've invested in an automotive franchise that's unparalleled. We serve more automotive production than anybody else. We serve more shorelines than anybody else. We serve more steel production than anybody else. We sit in the east where a majority of the consumption and manufacturing occurs in the United States. We talk about a balanced approach to things, a balance between service, productivity, and growth. That's how we named our new operating plan, TOP SBG. I think you're going to hear us talk about those types of things for long-term value creation. I think more importantly, you're going to get a better view into the depth of talent that we have at Norfolk Southern.
You know, we've got a really strong team, and it's a good mix between folks that we've brought in from outside Norfolk Southern who are aligned with our vision, aligned with our approach, and understand the value of our franchise, and then also homegrown talent that we've developed and that's dedicated their careers to Norfolk Southern.
Okay. Great. Any questions from the audience? Brandon?
Maybe, talk about your view of the timeline and kind of what needs to be accomplished in order to improve this performance of the intermodal network. Like, what are still some of the kind of joyful points to be able to get laborers out of that?
Yeah. Sorry, Alan, but the question was the timing of the intermodal service recovery.
Yeah, that's a great question. We're intently focused on that. One of the benefits of our broad-based improvement, our service product over the last six to eight months is that now we can really focus on specific segments and specific areas. Intermodal is one of them. We need to continue to focus on improving our domestic intermodal product. In fact, over each of the last three weeks, we've had members of our ops team, our marketing team, and our finance team in Chicago working on that very specific issue with a high degree of focus and a high degree of urgency. We set very clear objectives for it. You're going to see a lift in our intermodal service as we move into peak season, right? We always see that as we really focus on improving that premium product. It provides a lift to, frankly, all of our segments.
We know that as we improve the quality of our product and make it more valuable to our customers, such as J.B. Hunt and HUB Group, it helps us compete with truck no matter what the market is.
When you look at the challenges in terms of getting the service where you'd like it to be, how would you kind of rate the congestion issues versus labor challenges? How do we think about that?
You know, I would say some of it's labor. You know, we have a chart in our slideshow that shows the 95 different crew hiring locations that we have. You know, we've put out a targeted number for qualified, which means trained T&E employees, trained in engines, so conductors and engineers. And we had said that we'd be at 7,300 qualified employees by November. We hit that in October. We were a month ahead of that target. We're still more to go, right? We said we're going to hit that.
It was an interim target.
It was an interim. Thank you. That's, that's what I'm looking for. I think what's important there is that about three quarters of those 95 individual hiring locations are staffed where we need them, and about a quarter still have more room to go. That's a big improvement over where we were a couple of months ago. Similar to how I had spoken about our ability to narrow our focus on service improvements as we've seen it broad-based, we can also narrow our focus on hiring as well. Right now, about 85% of our conductor trainees are targeted at core locations for us. Well over a third are targeted at this number of locations where we're below target.
We're overweighted in terms of conductor trainees to core locations and locations that are below what we would consider to be the minimum threshold. Recognize each one of those locations is differently weighted in terms of the size, right? In some of those locations that were below the threshold, it's a really small workload location. It has a small impact. What it does mean is that Brendan will continue to hire. We're going to continue to narrow our focus where the resources need to go. It'll move into next year before we're fully staffed where we want to be.
I guess building on that question, with TOP SBG, you talked about intermodal being the focus out of the gate. Can you talk about what inning we're in in terms of rolling that operating plan out and realizing the benefits from that plan within intermodal? At what point do we kind of flip the switch and implement this in the general merchandise network as well?
I think one of the key points of TOP SBG is that it included intermodal along with merchandise and along with bulk. I'll compare that to TOP 21 that we rolled out in 2019, which was primarily merchandise focused. You know, what we've been able to do, because we look at this in the, along the principles of PSR, we look at this as a network. We've been able to deconflict our network. We've reduced the train meets by 40%. We've improved the balance at our merchandise terminals significantly. You're seeing the results in train speed. You're seeing the results in terminal dwell. You're seeing the results in our on-time performance. More importantly, our customers are seeing it.
Our customers are coming to us now, and they're talking to us about opportunities to bring more volume on to Norfolk Southern, which indicates the confidence they have in the trajectory of our service product and the confidence they have in our approach. You know, I'll highlight one area we've been talking for a while about, you know, we were concerned about the crew availability in the Midwest, right? If you think about our network, I mean, that's where a lot of our grain obviously originates. We had in our mind, we got to get that thing resolved by fall peak grain season, right? It's our job to resolve this stuff, right? We're being proactive. We're not passive about this. That includes availability bonuses. That includes increasing conductor trainee pay. That includes go teams. That includes temporary transfers.
We've even got some supervisors who are demonstrating their commitment to Norfolk Southern and our customers who are resigning their position as a supervisor and going back to their craft employee and operating trains, right? Because of all of this and because of this purposeful and intentional attention paid to getting this resolved for grain season, not only are we handling fall peak grain and our cycle times have reduced by about 20%, but we're participating in export opportunities that we frankly never even imagined that are available because of the low water levels on the Mississippi.
I guess going back to some of the intermodal commentary, could you talk about what you're seeing during peak season? You know, there's a lot of discussion around inventory levels, and you mentioned Walmart reporting this morning. How you're thinking about inventories today for your customers and how they progress going into next year?
Yeah, I think the peak season will be muted for us because of the impact of the consumer not growing as much in the past and because of the really loose truck market. We've also seen some international volumes kind of start to tail off, which would indicate inventory levels are somewhat more in balance. I think specific to Norfolk Southern, you're seeing a phenomenon where we're losing to truck share short haul business from the ports into destinations that are relatively close to the ports. We've talked about that, right? The loss of some of the IPI. You can see that quantitatively when you take a look at our third quarter results where our intermodal volumes were down about 5%, but our revenue time miles were effectively flat.
That tells you that the business, that 5% decline in business is in that really short haul market. I think as I think about long term, and that's where our focus is on long term value creation, you know, our customers, our channel partners, J.B. Hunt and HUB Group, they're the two best in the industry far and away. They're invested in growth, right? They're confident in our franchise. They're confident in the markets that we collectively serve. They're confident in the ability to take trucks off the highway in the east.
As we get into 2023, you're battling a weaker consumer, but you also have this opportunity to recapture share, and there's some secular drivers to intermodal. Do you think domestic intermodal volumes can be up next year, even in a mild recession?
Before we give you any guidance on 2023, I think we're going to continue our conversations with our customers. I think more quantitative guidance on 2023 would probably come during our fourth quarter earnings call in January. Broadly, what we're doing is we are improving the value of our product for our customers. We're improving, and we're improving the cycle times of our equipment and our customers' privately held equipment. You know, we see continued strength in energy and in food markets. I think even though we see, you know, some headwinds and there's some uncertainties, I'll pull it back to fourth quarter, right? We're going to outperform normal seasonality in the fourth quarter, even though we're seeing that kind of stuff.
It is natural that we might see something like that next year, but we will certainly offer more commentary in January.
Totally understand. I guess without getting into the details, you still have to plan for a certain economic environment in 2023. What is that economic environment that you're planning for? Are you assuming a mild recession? How do you think about managing resources in that environment? You know, Alan, I know we've talked a lot recently about being well positioned for the next upturn. How are you thinking about resources in a recession scenario?
Yeah, I think, as we think about next year, it's really going to be dependent upon our read of the tape and the macro environment and what we hear specifically from our customers. We're still pulling that information in. As I take a look at resources for next year, remember, we still have about 25 crew change locations where we need to continue to hire. We're not even at the minimum level. We're going to continue to focus on that. We're an organization that learns. We were kind of in a tough spot in 2021 and 2022 because we didn't have enough crews, right? We're taking a look at that. There are lessons learned. There are things that changed in the macro environment that contributed to that, such as the labor force participation rate and our ability to recall furloughs.
We know we understand that our responsibility is to provide a good service product consistently and reliably that our customers can build into their supply chain. That allows us to leverage the unique strengths of the Norfolk Southern franchise. We reach our full potential by reaching a good balance between service productivity and growth.
Okay. Great. Any questions from the audience? One over here.
Yeah. I guess what sort of put the switch more recently to enable that? What has sort of driven, you know, what we've seen in the strength?
The question's about the recent strengthening of call volumes.
Our services continued to improve throughout the summer as we moved into the fall. We're seeing some more production come online on our network, both in Northern app and in Central app. I think, again, the demand is pretty darn strong, particularly overseas right now because of what's going on with global energy markets. Domestically, you know, natural gas prices are still above $6 a million BTU. It's been a fairly warm fall, and so maybe there's a little bit of pause in utility angst about stockpile levels. I think as winter comes back or as winter arrives, we're going to see more pull from the domestic market as well.
I guess building on that question, any thoughts around coal RPU? I think on the conference call, you talked about the expectation for sequential pressure in the fourth quarter. Is that still your expectation today? Any early thoughts on next year, assuming prices kind of hold where they are currently?
Yeah, you know, what we saw is that as we exited the second quarter, moved into the third quarter, overseas prices started to decline. We were still riding some of that higher benefit because of the lag in our pricing relative to the underlying commodity prices. We moved through third quarter. Those overseas prices have found a floor and have stabilized. I think going forward, really what's going to impact our coal RPU, Justin, is going to be mix, right? You know, the mixed components are the mix between thermal export and metallurgical export and then domestic volumes in the utility market, between North and South, both with thermal and with utility North business. It tends to be a shorter haul than Lamberts Point metallurgical and utility South business.
Okay. It sounds like nothing's changed in terms of your near-term expectations on coal RPU?
No.
Okay. Mark, on the conference call, you talked about the network inefficiencies maybe driving around $40 million of kind of excess costs per quarter. Are you assuming that $40 million number comes down in the fourth quarter? Either way, like, how do you think of the cadence of that coming down and, eventually, getting it back to zero?
Yeah, it's, it's roughly $40 million a quarter. About half of that is labor. The other half has to do with things like drayage and, and other taxi costs and moving people around. I don't expect that that's going to, we're going to get any relief here in the fourth quarter on that. While we are seeing some relief in overtime and recrews, we're still moving people around to other parts of the network, like you would see on that slide, the 25 locations that are still well understaffed.
I think as we go into 2023, and we're working on that budget now, but as we look into 2023, I would expect to start seeing some relief at some point, hopefully in the first half of the year as the network really starts to get back to levels where we're comfortable and we get the staffing where we need it to be across the network.
Got it. Any other questions in the audience? One right here, Ben?
Yeah, it sounds like there's targeted locations where you're hiring. And maybe what's that, you know, then you have natural attrition on the other side of that, efficiencies in different places.
Yeah.
Maybe frame just those two specific items where it sounds like there is some visibility. These 25 locations need to get to this minimum level so we have continuous kind of operational improvements and efficiency on the other side of that. Maybe just that piece of the pie on where you want to get your labor, you know, if you could number of heads.
Oh, okay. I get you. We had said we'd given an interim target to the Surface Transportation Board of 7,300 in November of this year and then 7,500 early next year. That's still where we're thinking about things. We're still going to look for labor productivity. As we sit down and we talk to our customers and take a look at the macro environment, really that is going to be the toggle point on kind of what our headcount needs to look like as we move through next year.
I would just add, you know, that we had an interim target, like Alan mentioned, we've got 7,543, I think, out there in May as a target we put out with the STB. Like Alan's saying, it's dynamic. You know, we're learning, we're following the demand curves, and, you know, we'll continue to adjust location by location, and you'll see the chart that I'm referring to. Ninety-five different locations, and all of them, we're hiring really for all of them because there's always going to be attrition in some of them. We have the majority of our training right now, of our training class, really looked at for the core locations, of which many of those are on the left of the chart that we'll have illustrated where they're currently understaffed, you know. It is very, very dynamic.
The targets are changing location by location, but we are making really good progress right now.
I think it's also important to note that we continue to recalibrate our plan, right? That's one of the principles of PSR. You put a plan in place, have great oversight, great compliance, figure out what's working, and look for areas where you can continue to drive productivity. That, that's where we are now because we made such great strides in our resources, in our service product, and frankly, in our leadership. As we recalibrate our plan, it's operations, it's Mark's finance team scoring it, sitting right there next to us, and our marketing team all together in one room doing it.
I guess building on that headcount question, if we're in a recession in 2023 and industry rail volumes are down low single digits to mid single digits, how would you expect your headcount to trend in that environment? Hypothetically, would it be down by a similar amount? Or just given the service issues that we have today, would it be flat?
That is a hypothetical, Justin.
Yeah, totally hypothetical.
I'm probably not going to really dig into that too much, right? We still need to add employees to our, to our, 25 locations. We know that as our service has improved throughout the year, we're starting to see a lift in our volume. We know that our, that as we make our product more competitive or the value of our product more competitive because of improved service product, it will attract more volume. Rail's going to be less expensive than truck. Rail now offers that sustainability advantage, relative to truck. That's now important to our customers. Rail helps people build inventories. We are going to continue to focus on improving our product quality, staying close to our customers, calibrating our plan, and figuring out where our resources are and where they need to be.
Okay. Understood. On pricing, I know that's something you've highlighted for a while now, the strength that we've seen. As we think about 2023 with inflation going up, contract rates and truckload going down, what's your confidence you can continue to price above inflation next year? How much visibility do you have to that today?
You know, we have, we've never chased a spot market, and we have, we have committed over the long term to secure rates in excess of inflation, recognizing that we participate in a highly competitive environment, right? Like I talk about a balanced approach between service, productivity, and growth for long-term value creation. That's kind of the approach that we've taken at pricing, right? We don't chase markets up or down. What you've seen is 29 of the last 30 quarters, you know, we've seen RPU X fuel year over year improvements in our merchandise RPU and 23 straight in intermodal. You're now, you're talking about six, seven, eight years where we've been able to do that through economic upcycles and economic downcycles.
We're going to, I think that's probably the right approach for us going forward, both as we manage our pricing, as we manage our markets, and as we manage our operating plan and our resources.
Okay. Still confident in pricing above inflation next year?
We've been doing it the last seven years.
Okay. Understood. Maybe Mark, shifting back to you, question on CapEx as we move into 2023, any kind of high-level thoughts you could share initially? Then it's a little bit nuanced, but on the call, you mentioned about $50 million of labor costs that will be capitalized. Could you just explain a little bit more on how slash why that's occurring and if that's something we should expect going forward?
Okay. Labor is something that's capitalized every year. You know, we lay down, you know, 500 some odd miles of rail every single year along with the, you know, a couple million ties. The labor to do that is part of the cost that gets capitalized. Now you can imagine we were capitalizing at certain wage rates, and you now have higher wage rates that have been struck in the tentative agreements. We're basically taking the $50 million associated with those higher wage rates and putting them into the capital budget for, or the capital account for the year. That's all that is. It's nothing new. It's just reflecting the wage rates at a higher rate. With regard to CapEx for 2023, again, we don't want to get into guidance, but I will tell you it will go up.
You know, we've, we're dealing with a lot of inflation right now. I think I did mention on the call that, you know, CapEx would be at the high end of the guidance range for 2022 in large part because of inflation, but also because of the wage rates, which you could also call inflation-driven. We're facing similar type of inflation pressures into next year. Without putting too much of a finer point on it, it'll be going up in 2023.
Okay. You know, going back to the question on inefficiencies in the network and the cost that is creating and that cost kind of coming down into next year, accessorial fees are another area where we've seen obviously a significant increase. What would you think about the cadence of those coming down? Would that be in line with the cadence of the inefficiency costs coming down, or any color you can provide us? Maybe just recent trends in accessorials and what you've seen in the fourth quarter.
You know, the accessorial fees are dependent upon kind of the supply chain disruptions outside of our gate, right? That's with the drayage industry. That's with the warehouse industry. What we've done is we've offered a storage service product to our customers to allow them to store their containers on our terminals until they can work through those disruptions outside of our gate. We're very hopeful, frankly, that those come down because what that'll mean is more throughput through our terminals, more throughput through the warehouses, which means significantly more volume for us. Right now, we haven't, we haven't seen it. Accessorial fees are still trending kind of sequentially flat.
Very different dynamics than those that are affecting the service disruption costs.
Yeah.
Okay. They'll be on different paths.
Yeah.
Okay. Helpful. Any questions from the audience? Got maybe a few more minutes left. One over here.
You mentioned your corporate locations are on the left side of the chart for understaffed, right?
No, what I've said is there are 95 different locations that we hire to. There are about 25 of them on the left. So you got our chart in front of us?
Yeah.
Okay. You got 25 that were under a.
Minimally staffed.
Minimal threshold. Some of those are core locations. A lot of them are really small locations.
There are core locations that are in the green. The core locations are distributed all, all throughout.
What makes us encouraged about where we're headed is 85% of our conductor trainees in the class right now are targeted for core locations. Does that help?
Yeah. I was kind of confused about the implication that there were more core locations in the below.
No.
Than the above.
No. That was, if I said that, that was unintentional. Thank you for bringing that up.
Alan, you said earlier the franchise is built for growth. I expect that to be a key theme at Investor Day. What types of technology investments need to be made in order to support that growth? Maybe you could just talk broadly about your tech strategy going forward and where those investments could be made.
You know, one of the reasons we moved to Atlanta is access to more digitally savvy employees, all right? We're in the right spot for that. As I think about technology, it plays three really key roles for us. One is using technology to improve productivity. Another one is using technology to model our network and think about different ways to change our operating plan to make service better and make us more efficient and more resilient. The third thing is that digital interface with our customers. You know, our job is to provide a consistent and reliable service product and layer on top of that a best-in-class customer experience. That includes that digital engagement with our customers. We operate in a supply chain ecosystem, and we compete with truck every single day. Trucks offer a pretty good level of visibility.
Rail needs to do that as well. I consider us a leader in that space, which is one of the reasons that we launched RailPulse, which tries to pull together a bunch of different constituents in the rail space to offer that level of visibility in the carload sector to our customers.
On RailPulse, when do you expect that to have a meaningful impact on the customer experience and your ability to drive more truckload conversions?
We are, we're outfitting some of our cars today, as are the other partners in the network. As more partners come online, you start to reach a critical mass, and it'll really help. This is a multi-year plan. Again, we're taking a long-term approach to a lot of things.
Okay. Any last questions from the audience? Alan, I'll turn it over to you to maybe close things. Is there anything that we've missed or you feel like is important that's not well understood by the investment community or getting lost in all the noise of 2022?
Yeah. You know, it was here last December 1 that we committed to making improvements in our service product. We've addressed, and we are addressing staffing. We're addressing our plan. We are addressing our leadership, and you're seeing results there. We have a team that is highly competent and dedicated and is really aligned around a vision for long-term shareholder creation as a customer-centric, operations-driven service organization. We're implementing our own modern PSR operating plan that strikes the right balance between service, productivity, and growth. We know that we've got some unique strengths on our franchise. I talked about a number of them, and I'm going to close with one of them. One is our intermodal franchise, and it's our intermodal channel partners like J.B.
Hunt and HUB Group who are investing in growth and who see the opportunity for highway-to-rail conversion in the east using our strong network, using the sustainability advantage that rail offers. We are going to leverage those unique strengths.
That's a good way to end it. Alan, Mark, Luke, thanks for being here. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thanks, everyone.