All right. Good afternoon, everyone. We'll get started with our keynote address. It really is with great pleasure that I'm going to introduce today our keynote speaker, Mr. Jim Vena. As all of you know, he's the Chief Executive Officer of Union Pacific Railroad. I'll do a quick intro. For those of you not familiar with Jim, he's been a railroader for more than four decades. A wealth of information and experience. Vast majority of that was at Canadian National Railway. He rose in the ranks, became COO there. He moved over to Union Pacific, first as COO, and then now as CEO. I might have glossed over a few things in the meantime there.
I don't blame you. I don't blame you, Walter.
15-20 years I've known Jim, and I got to say, he's not only a skilled railroader, but he's a phenomenal leader. When we were looking and deliberating to try to find a keynote speaker for this event, we wanted to find someone that could speak to major forces of change, and one that wouldn't just be railroad-focused, that could extend across multiple sectors and I think we found that. We also wanted somebody that wasn't going to be too theoretical or conceptual. We wanted someone that could give hands-on experience on affecting these changes. Entirely from a practical standpoint, I think we found it with Jim. He's lived and breathed some of the changes that we're going to talk about here. He could speak to them from experience, and I'm very delighted to have him on that.
What are the two forces of change that we're going to talk about here today? They are the notion of transformational change and consolidation. Those are two aspects that really have profound effects on a company, on the sector, and I think they're great topics for conversation here today. No one better to speak about this than the leader who has been the key architect of Precision Scheduled Railroading. For those of you in the railroad industry, you'll be very familiar with that, but for those that aren't, it has swept over the railroad sector and over this past decade or two, and he's really been at the forefront of that. The second thing is consolidation. Consolidation has been a major force of change within many sectors.
Now Jim is leading the charge on perhaps one of the biggest rail, or the biggest railroad combination of all time with Norfolk Southern. To drill into the dynamics of those two concepts, we're going to do the same format as we've been doing for this conference, and that's the fireside chat format. Before we dive into that, Jim, I think you have a few prepared comments to make.
You betcha.
Start with this slide.
Before we started with the merger, this was one paragraph. Now, because of the merger, the lawyers got a hold of it. Basically what it says is I'm going to be making some forward-looking points. Hopefully, nothing that's brand new, but Walter always seems to be able to get something out of me. If I do, appreciate it, just go on our website, take a look at what we've had or call Diana, who's here in the room with me, and our team will fill you in if you want some more detail on what I say. It's as simple as that. Hopefully, you all read it. I thought we'd start with where we are as a company, and that's real important for us in that we needed to be at the right place.
If you take a look at fundamentally, I think this morning, we are something like $157 billion company. The reason we're $157 billion company is because we deliver on value to our shareholders with the revenue that we get. That's real important for us to make sure that we understand that. What is it that we need to deliver? We have to be safe. We have to operate a safe railroad. We were the safest railroad in North America last year for employees coming to work and going home the same and not being injured. That's a real good check mark. On the incident or accident side, we improved by double-digit improvement again year-over-year. We're not the best, and we want to be the best. Guess what? Our partner that we want to merge with was the best.
You bring those two railroads together, you're able to learn and do things that actually win. Service. In the railroad industry, anybody that follows it close will tell you that we give more information out than a lot of companies that we're required to by statute. We give train speed, we give different things. All those have nothing to do with service. All those are numbers that give you a guide on how well maybe some operational metrics are. What we call service is what we sold the customer, and that's real important. It's what we agreed to and what we're going to do. We've ended up last year at the highest service level we've ever had, both for intermodal and our merchandise business and our bulk business.
On top of that, customers see it, and we see customers looking at how we're being able to perform and rewarding us with some awards. Toyota just came out and we won four of their five awards they gave out for service and quality in the railroad industry. We won four of the five. Some people would be happy with that, but that's only 80%. I said to Kenny and Eric, "Get going. We need to, this year, get that last one." At the end of the day, pretty happy with that. What's operational excellence? People talk about PSR, people talk about whatever. It's actually using the assets you have in a real smart way, because we are asset-intensive. We need to replace ties. We need to place rails.
We need to make sure the locomotives run, and the railcars. We want to use them as good as anybody. Our metrics will show you that we are consistently, the last few years, the best at operational excellence. Some people precipitate it down to OR, which is margin. Us railroaders, I don't know why we try to screw that up. It's actually margin. Our OR is under 60. That's a good place to be. We don't drive the railroad for that OR number, because what I don't want is the marketing people to worry about saying, "I can't bring this business in because it might get the OR to go from 59.9 to 60. We wouldn't be happy." I hate to tell you, if you could grow the business by $500 million, I'll take that 59.9 to 60.
We'll work hard to figure out how to make it efficient. That's who we are. We didn't put the other rail peers on there. For investors, you can see where we are. In the first quarter, we beat our nearest competitor when it came to OR by over 400 basis points. Which it gives us a big gap, and it helps us in the way we price, it helps us the way we look at business, and it helps us on what we can bring in by being very efficient. For our shareholders, highest return on invested capital. Pretty happy. If we can go to the next one, please. How are we doing this? This one slide is just one snippet, because it's what you do across the entire company operationally. Since 2019, when I joined UP. You know what?
You guys are all real serious. Why don't we have a little bit of fun? I wasn't coming back to work. I was real happy. I retired after 40 years at Canadian National. Great company. Love the company still today. I spent a lot of time, nights, days. I was an engineer on the ground. Okay? A conductor switching boxcars. I was in the engineering department throwing ties out. I never did like conductors too much because they worked us hard that time. I got over it. It took me 20 years. At the end of the day, that's who I am. I grew up in the railroad from the ground up by accident. I never thought I was going to be a railroader. I'm retired. Went to Mount Everest base camp a few times, the north side through Tibet, south side through Nepal.
Did Mont Blanc, around it, went to Italy and France, went around the whole thing. Down in South America, Grand Canyon, down and up, because people told me that you should never hike the Grand Canyon from the top to the bottom and back up in one day. Guess what Vena says. I think I can do it. 16 mi , over 5,000 ft of elevation gain. I did it in 7 hours, and I was at home by 6 o'clock having pasta and some beer. Okay. Loved it. That's what I was doing, and I was enjoying myself. I came to Union Pacific in 2019 because of the challenge. It is the biggest railroad in North America. We own more track miles owned than anybody else, 26,000 versus 21,000. We get the highest revenue.
At the end of the day, it was, let's see what we could do with this railroad that's not optimized, and what can we do to drive it to another place? This slide gives you a real good indication of that. We took a railroad. If you were operating the business that we're operating today like we operated it back in 2019, we'd have 24% more trains running than we do today. We did not take the system and take it down and remove assets and track. What we did was, is it's given us that buffer that we can grow, and we can recover quicker. Now, we've done that with train length. Today, we operate 24% less trains than we would have if we would've had the same model, and our speed is faster.
Our customers are seeing less touch points in the cars, less time in the terminals, and they get to the destination quicker because our car velocity has gone from under in the 100s numbers to over 200, and that moves the railcar from origin to destination. I could keep on going. I'd love to. Maybe, when I retire, I'll get on the speaking circuit like a lot of these ex-CEOs talking about what they were doing back in 2014. They were running a shitty railroad, and they want to tell us now how to run this railroad, and we're running it better than they ever have. Did I just say that out loud, Walter?
Just did. Yeah.
I knew I'd get a little reaction from some of you. It's amazing how people are experts after they retire. Jim Vena will not go on the speaking circuit. The day I retire, okay, I'll leave with my two boxes out of my office. I will take the company plane home. Okay. At that point, you won't see me again. If you want to come and see me, come and see me in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the wintertime. In the summertime, come to Jasper, Alberta. We'll go hiking. Okay. In Sorrento, British Columbia, on the lake there. That's just an absolutely gorgeous place. That's where I'll be with my grandkids, my kids, my family, my friends. You will not get me out here, Walter, to speak about the freaking railroads. Okay. Unless somebody says some bad things about me, then I'll come out of retirement for the day.
That's who we are, and I think it's a great picture of what we do. We carry a buffer of locomotives and a buffer of people and a buffer of resources because the recoverability makes a big difference in service. If it takes you a month to recover from a weather event, guess what? That's bad for the customer, and they look for options. Let's talk about the railroads for a minute. At Canadian National, we used to go through the Yellowhead Pass to get to Vancouver. Yellowhead Pass, at the highest, is just over 3,000 ft. It's not even 4,000 ft. Yeah, we get some winter there. It's cold. We get some snow. I'm telling you, this freaking UP, when they built the railroad, who the heck put those mountains on the way to the West Coast of California?
We come out with six, seven locomotives, while CN can come out with two or three . Big difference in the railroad and big difference on it. Somebody decided that you'd put these mountains in a place where on our main line coming out of the northern part of California, we get 500- 800 inches of snow over The Donner Pass every winter. It's sort of fun. I love it. That's why I came back to work, and I like where we are, and I like what we're doing. You probably want to hear a little bit about the merger. We thought this through very carefully. In Canada, there's two railroads that go across the country. Canadian Pacific goes from St. John all the way to Vancouver, and Canadian National goes from Halifax all the way to Vancouver and Prince Rupert.
They serve customers across the entire country. I'm telling you, as an ex-CNer, they do a good job on what they charge and as good as anybody to move the products. In the United States, there has not been a transcontinental railroad that will go from ocean East Coast to the West Coast. I think we limit the capability of customers, shippers, suppliers to win in the marketplace because you're competing against more than just your local customer. You're competing against the world, whether it's in soybeans from Brazil coming into Mexico, whether it's steel from other places, whether it's copper, whether it's grain products, whether it's ethanol. At the end of the day, that's what we're building.
The merger, when we put the first application in, was we thought gave a good story and gave the metrics and everything that the STB, the regulator, needed to go through. They gave us three key areas that we had to update when they didn't accept it, and also a couple of small ones. In this application, we've answered those three questions. One was, is we've done a full asset view and full waybill view of the movement of traffic within the U.S., and that was before we did a sampling. The reason we did the sampling instead of the full was we just didn't have the information from all the railroads that would allow us to do the full waybill analysis. We received all the information, and we've got it in there. It really didn't change the flows, the competitiveness.
If I step back, we answered the questions pretty clear. We were absolutely sure this was great for America. Here you are, you're listening to a person that was born in Italy. People ask me the question sometimes, "Are you Canadian?" I love Canada. I loved growing up in Canada. I wouldn't change a thing that my parents came over with two suitcases and moved to Jasper, Alberta. I'm 37 years old. I wouldn't change anything. I love the place. I lead an American railroad, and my job is to lead an American railroad, not to lead something else. Okay. My job is to make sure that we do the best for Union Pacific, its shareholders, its customers, and what we can do in the nation in America to move it. We don't operate into Canada.
We can affect what happens in Canada a little bit with the railroads, but that's it. Bottom line is when we looked at the merger, we thought it was real good for the entire country. That's why we put it forward. I know Walter's going to have a whole bunch of questions. The other two areas that people wanted to see was, we have this small railroad that a number of railroads in the U.S. and even in Canada own, and it's a switching rail in St. Louis that is operated at the least cost because we don't want to make profit out of it. It's handling the interchange of traffic between the parties. Some of the railroads said that we needed to have more information, even though we said we don't want to ever own 50% of it. That wasn't good enough.
In this application, we bumped that up and said exactly what the process would be and how we'd get to the solution. The last one was the release of our document that gives you the red line, at what point ourselves or Norfolk Southern could walk away from the deal. That's normal when you're doing an $85 billion deal. You want to have some rules of the game. Simple as that. What does this do? It's a seamless operation. Think about it for a minute. I'm sure you've had some of the Canadian railroads up on stage, Walter.
I did.
I bet you not one of them came in here and said, "You know what? We think that the business is not quite as good, the railroads in Canada. We should stop in Winnipeg." Sell the eastern portion of our networks so that two other railroads could own them, and we'll just interchange in Winnipeg. What you do is you limit the movement of goods. You don't do it at the same price. This is what we're going to offer. Faster service across the U.S. at less cost. The reason it's less cost is, and it's in our application, single line railroad moves are substantially priced less than if you have multiple parties that need to make a profit on every piece of their movement.
In fact, the reason we can do it cheaper and offer a different price is every time you set a rail car off to another railroad, someone has to switch that rail car. Somebody has to handle it before it gets to destination. Then the other railroad has to have the expense of picking up the rail car, switching it, putting it on a train, and moving it. Those two steps are removed, and you can go seamlessly from Denver to Indiana. You can go from Michigan to the West Coast easier. That's what we're selling. Makes a whole bunch of sense, and those are the facts about what we are. At the end of it, how big are we going to be? Because if I was a regulator, I would worry about it. Is it going to be that Union Pacific has 80% of the market?
In actual fact, we're going to be less than 40% or around 40%. On a gross ton basis, we're actually going to be the same size as Berkshire-owned BNSF. Is there going to be competition out there? CSX is still going to be there to compete against us. They're a strong, big railroad, well-run, smart CEO over there, and he's doing everything he can to make them as efficient as possible to compete. In the West, we have Berkshire-owned. Berkshire, let's get serious. This is not little BN. This is over a trillion-dollar company, Berkshire, that owns assets in the oil and gas, owns insurance everywhere else, and has $400 billion in cash in the bank.
They can do what they want to do, and if anybody thinks they're going to be an easy competitor, any customer that has Burlington Northern as our competitor today will have it tomorrow. In the entire merger, because it's bolt-on, there's only five customer locations that we have found that will go from two to one . Maybe there's one more somewhere that we missed with one rail car that they ship a year, and we'll fix that. Any customer that's going to go from two to one access, we'll open it up and put another railroad and have access to that customer. Final point is on interswitching, reciprocal switching. In Canada, there's reciprocal switching. Anybody that's a certain distance from an interchange can get access to a customer. I'm all for that.
I'm not afraid of doing that, and I've been very public about it, and I have been public for 10 years, even before we talked about this merger. I think if a customer's not provided the right level of service, then you should be able to have an option to go to somebody else. The only thing I ask is that the rules are simple, that everybody understands what they are, and we don't pay a whole bunch of lawyers to fight about what the rules are. Lawyers hate that, right? They want the rules to be muddied up so that you spend all your time hiring these expensive law firms. Listen, we have a few law firms right now that are helping us, and they're expensive. I should've been a lawyer. Nah, I'm good. I love being railroad.
The bottom line is that's who we are. That's what we're trying to do. We know the merger is good. Let me just say this final point on the merger, and then we'll open it up for questions, Walter. I've taken a lot of time. I apologize.
Right.
In business, stop and think about it for a minute. If your competitor in your market, in your business, was doing things that were illogical, that were not good, and their product was not going to be good, would you complain? You'd have to be an idiot to complain. In fact, you should be sending them a card telling them how smart they are and how tough their competition is. The reason we have some of the other railroads complaining so hard is we're going to provide a level of service when you move products across the country at such a high level because we get rid of touch points that they have to compete against that. If you can't compete, and some of them are already trying to compete by having agreements with other railroads.
The problem with those, in our history, they never stay for a long time because people get internal and look at themselves, and they have to do it on price. That's what they're worried about. They're going to have to drop their price in what they charge if they want to compete against the new Union Pacific. While we do not have to because we get the advantage of the efficiency we get in not touching rail cars. I'm excited about this. Personally, I think it's a slam dunk. I don't know why it's going to take the STB this long to get it approved. With that, Walter, I'm good.
Let's open it up for her. Yeah.
You want Jennifer to come up here? Because she's probably better at this than me by a long shot.
She's shaking her head no.
No?
We're good. Yeah. You've touched on the two elements of change that we're looking to focus on. One being the transformational change of Precision Scheduled Railroading brought into your industry. Really where I want to go is what is it, how does it work, and are we going to see more either at UP in general, but in a combined entity as well? We can talk a bit about consolidation. Perhaps, you were one of the original architects of it. The late great Hunter Harrison kind of created it, this notion of Precision Scheduled Railroading. If you can in your own words just describe what that is, how difficult it is to implement. It really is almost a cultural and full on operational change of an organization. How difficult was that to manage the first go and the second go around?
Well, listen, let's back up a little bit and maybe, because we have some time, tell a little bit of history. You learn from great people. You learn from people in the business world, and I'm sure all of you have done that. You've met some people that you don't learn too much from, and you're glad that you're not working for them. There is some people that are real key. I was blessed having Paul Tellier as a CEO when he came in from government and did a spectacular job and made Canadian National into a publicly traded company. Before it was a Crown corporation. His view of the world was, you need to move fast, you can't have too much bureaucracy. Truly amazing from a guy that came from.
From government.
From the government. He did a spectacular job. Hunter Harrison comes on and he was the first CEO I have ever worked for that could come out in the field and actually look at the operation to see how well you're doing. He'd come out with a blank piece of paper and start asking you questions about how you were doing, and he really pushed you to think about what's possible. What can you actually do and how can you get better? He had a few sayings. You have to sweat the assets, and you don't build the church for Easter Sunday. That point I disagree with him on. Okay. At the end of the day, you learn, and that's how this whole efficiency of how you have to make sure you look inside the company and how you can do that.
For the longest time, the railroads just didn't spend enough time to look at how they were operating. He truly taught me a lot. I was blessed to have Claude Mongeau that was balanced in very strategic, very view of what, and had a much more customer-centric view that you need to have. Hunter would've cut to the last locomotive while Claude was, we need to look at what the customer's doing and how the relationship is. I've taken all that, and when I went to Union Pacific, and even at Canadian National, listen, we had some ORs at Canadian National that were in the 53s and change. That's a pretty good number. We've never been able to replicate that. I'm hoping to, but it's not like in the top of the list of things I want to do.
At the end of it, what you need to do is, it's first changing the culture of the people and what they look at and what they spend their time. First thing you need to teach the operating people is, your number 1 job is to make the railroad deliver on what we sold our customer, and make sure that they get the product when what you promised. Second is you need to spend all your time on how well the operation works and break it down piece by piece. That, and have the best measures so that you can see that and react quick if things aren't going the right way. When you put those things in place, you're able to drop your dwell time on how long it takes you to move a car through a terminal by 40%.
You're able to move trains, railcars faster by 25%. You're able to touch cars less so that you do that. That's what it's about. It's not just the operation. If everybody thinks it's just the trains, you need to have that culture through the engineering department on the miles of rail you have to inspect, the amount of ties you put in, how you can do it faster and better, and you spend money on technology. We've been able to spend money on technology that allow us to manage, but also give us answers on the results. Nowadays, everybody talks about AI and it's great. It really is. It gives you some information quick, especially generative and what you can get out of it.
At the end of the day, we've been trying to do that without the whole AI, is look at the information that we get and come to a better solution. You have to be top to bottom in the company aligned. You can't have a CEO that's a PR person or worried about how his cufflinks look or worried about where he's going to go stay or where he's going to fly to. You need a CEO that puts his boots on the ground and goes out. I spend time on the ground. I'm absolutely sure if you interviewed any of the frontline people at Union Pacific, they love it when I show up. No, they don't. Keep the heat on them, make sure that the focus is on what we have to do. I tried to give it on a high level and hopefully I answered that question.
Absolutely. Really, the next question, and you mentioned Paul Tellier, you mentioned Hunter Harrison. "The Pig That Flew" is a book that I recommend if anyone is interested in the Paul Tellier story. It's a really good synopsis of that. Then "The Railroader" is another good book that gives the authorized biography of Hunter Harrison. I thought it was a pretty interesting one. When PSR is quote unquote done and you've got the efficiency that you want, my question is, are you there on Union Pacific right now? Because so often I hear many managers say we're going to pivot to growth now, and the growth doesn't seem to come in the way that we were-
Right
we were kind of told. Where are you in that journey of PSR, and is there still more operating synergy and opportunity to have at Union Pacific? Are you going to wait it out until Norfolk Southern comes on, and then open it all up again to operational improvement? Is there more left to go?
Walter, my view of the world of how to operate a railroad is you need to be very efficient, but you also have to grow your business. The best thing you can do is grow the business. Topline growth and cargo growth is the way it is, and we've done a good job at Union Pacific growing our business, and at the same time as we want to get more efficient. I'm not into driving the efficiency to the point where it affects us on being able to grow our business.
We're starting to see that. Customers see on our domestic moves, on autos, on auto parts, on aggregate. I could go through the whole list. You know what? People sometimes think that what we move is a railcar, but we actually move every week 30 billion pounds just at Union Pacific of products that are used every day by our customers. Now, I made that number big by multiplying out because we always like talking big. We're railroaders, right? We talk tons. You multiply it out and it's even bigger than that this week. We're running at about 168,000 railcars versus last year at 162,000. Nice growth. We're moving. Multiply the 163 times about 90 or 100 tons per car, multiply it times 2,000 tons, that's how you have the 30 billion. There's a lot of product we move. That's how we win, is to grow that, Walter.
Let's move over to consolidation now. There's two aspects to consolidation, I think, that bring significant merit to the railroad industry. The first one is just the fact that you've shrunk your competitive base. 40 years in the industry, you can give us a sense of what it was like in the dark days and what consolidation did from the sector. Then we'll go into the more specific of Norfolk Southern. In 1980, there were 39 Class I railroads. Right now there's six, two in each region. Barriers to entry obviously are very high. Can you talk a bit about how consolidation affected your ability to do business, your ability to service the customer, deal with your competitors, and the whole gamut? Like I said, I know in 2004, the railroad industry saw its renaissance. It wasn't like that before.
Right.
Just talk a little bit about how consolidation played a role in that.
Listen, you just can't compete with customers if you're handing it off 8x to go across the U.S., like it used to, right? You'd handle it with Union Pacific, then the CNW, then the MoPac, then you go the North Western, and then the Western, and then the Southern, and then you go deliver it. Every one of those steps costs you 24-48 hours. By the time you went across, a truck is going to beat you and make four other trips. The consolidation was important. Does the consolidation control so much of the market that you say, "Listen, there's a problem with that"? Railroads handle about 11% of the total freight traffic in the U.S. You start there at 11%, and we actually have limited ourselves by not having an end-to-end movement from one part of the country to the other and the serving.
Walter, as simple as that. I'm a collector of a few things. Cars, vehicles, and also, I have a number of old railroad advertisement panels that they used to use before social media. I have one from World War II that talks about the 47 railroads that are all combined for the war effort. Canadian National's on there, the Central Vermont's on there, Union Pacific, CNW. If I ever need a lesson on what happened there, I just go to that baby that's in my office in my home in Scottsdale, and I take a look at it.
Yeah. Now let's move now to Norfolk Southern. We learn back in school that oftentimes acquisitions fail more often than they work. It seems that in some sectors, they do tend to work very well. I used to cover the waste sector, and certainly the consolidation.
Yeah
there has been working very well. Railroads, it's worked very well. What makes it, what concerns do you have when you look at an acquisition of a railroad with the size of Norfolk Southern? Never this size before. What do you worry about? Maybe you talk a little bit about system integration and so on when you touch on that answer.
Well, Walter, I think we have been planning for how we would move ahead once the merger gets approved. It's not going to be easy. I'm not trying to say that it's easy, but we are very comfortable that we have the right process in place of how we would handle it. You deal with different cultures. People in the eastern part of the U.S. and at Norfolk Southern have a little bit different culture. Like, let's get serious. People from New Orleans are different than people from Omaha, right? Just culturally, weather-wise, everything else. The same thing from South Carolina to California. At the end of the day, we need to make sure that we do this in a very systematic step process, not be too hurried, and do it in the right way. I have done it before, not at this scale. Okay?
I was the Senior Vice President when we brought on the EJ&E. I was in Western Canada when we brought in the BC Rail. There is things that you need to do smart. The first step we're going to take is guarantee a job for every unionized employee so that when they come to work, they know anybody that the very first day that we buy the company, we've guaranteed a job for life for every unionized employee. We use attrition. Okay? If we slow down and look at productivity and, you know, it runs about 7%, it's pretty easy to sort of adjust things in the right way. The very first thing we're going to do is not try to do the technical piece with the computer systems and everything else together.
We can operate the railroad and get the operating plan in place and be able to provide a service for the customers, and we can do that pretty seamlessly by putting the two sort of operating plans together into one. We'll stop there and we're going to have a customer advisory board and probably around 40 people or 45 people. We've analyzed the type of people that we want, and they're going to be shippers and movers of product with us so that we can do a check and balance to see if we're in the right place before we do that. We'll do the technical sort of NetC ontrol, the base operating system into that railroad at the right time when we think we're ready. We did it at Union Pacific two Januaries ago, and that system is actually brand spanking new.
We built it, and it is a upgrade on the key foundation program that operates our railroad. All the design, all the payments, everything, the car records all come from that. Also, we have to do that because you cannot go backwards. Once you shut the other system down, you lose some time, and the worst thing you could do, it'd take you a long time to recover all those records if you lost them, and we were able to do that seamlessly. Nobody even heard about it. We did it over a weekend. We had a lot of people working on it, and we'll do the same thing with everything at Norfolk Southern. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but we are absolutely sure that we can do this and do this right so that we don't get the same.
Times have changed. It's amazing. People talk about the 1990s, there was a problem with railroad mergers. In 1990, did any of you have cell phones? Did any of you be able to get information the way we get it today? Can you ask, can you ask AI? Take a picture of yourself and say, "Is this the ugliest haircut you've ever had?" It gives you an answer. Okay. At the end of the day, times have changed, and we have better information, better information flow, better ways to react. I'm very comfortable that we'll be systematic, and we put it in place, Walter, in a great way.
Let's move on to the regulator decision and the topic of concessions. You've had the $750 million number out there. How magical is that? Maybe if you could talk a little bit about what hands are in the air right now, what you would be willing, and where do you see it logical to give up concessions and where you'd be a little more resistant.
Well, this is truly a bolt-on. What it is we are combining in places where we meet today. It's pretty hard to come up with any concessions. What would we give away, right? At the end of it, we came up with the $750 million because when we looked at it originally, when we put the application in and real early, that we thought there would be some loss in business while we were waiting for the merger to get approved. When we've looked at it again, we really, other than a little bit of overlap, we don't see a lot of area where we have to make some adjustments. The TRRA, that terminal, we're going to give up some. That's not financial of a hit for us. It's a real low number. It's nowhere near $750 million.
That was where we started. That's why when we put the application in and we've been pretty clear on it, that we think the concessions are zero. Will we sit down and talk to people? You're better off to have your neighbor accept that it's a good thing that we're doing. What I'm not going to do, I'm not going to tell my neighbor he can park on my driveway. Okay? I don't know if any of you in this room would do that. We have two driveways. They want to come over to my driveway because I bought the house next door. That's not going to happen. If you want my driveway, I'll charge you monthly, $500 a month to park your vehicle in my driveway. You're not getting it for free. Walter, let's get serious here.
Let me-
We got a lot of overlap. People would love it. They get something for free. I'm not into giving anybody anything for free.
What do you, just to wrap up here, how do you look at in the future when you go 10 years from now and Union Pacific has done its deal with Norfolk Southern? How does it look? Has there been other deals? Do you think that this trail blazed now a way to open the door to other deals so that we get more consolidation in the sector?
I think, five years down the road, the American customer and shippers on the railroad are going to say, "Son of a gun, why didn't they do that five years before?" Because it worked, makes sense, we can compete better. On the railroad industry, absolutely, they know it already, that they say, "Holy cow, what are we going to do?" Walter, let's get serious. CSX wanted to merge with us. It's out there. I'll say it publicly. It isn't like they didn't see the value in a merger. They would love to merge. The only problem they have is at this point, Berkshire has said no. So far, none of the Canadians have stepped up to see what they could do. Up to them. I'm not worried about what they do. I think there will be some more consolidation.
I think we provide better service to customers. I think the customers see a win, whether there's six railroads, five railroads, or whatever that number is. It's a win-win. I'll be happy. I'll be smoking my cigar, having a good Irish 27-year-old Redbreast whiskey, watching my grandkids or great-grandkids enjoying themselves. I'll tell you, I won't even be thinking of all of you on the railroad, okay. Thank you very much, Walter.
On that note, thank you very much for your time, Jim. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you.