Good news. I found Mr. Jim Vena.
Pardon me?
I said I found you. You're working the room. That's pretty amazing. Great. Let's keep the transport content going. Very happy to welcome back to Laguna, Union Pacific Railroad CEO, Jim Vena. Welcome back, sir, and CFO, Jennifer Hamann. Thanks so much. Tons going on. I know we have some slides out and there are QR codes on your desks for you to access the slides. Jim, I don't know if you want to start with some opening comments and maybe walk through what's in them.
Ravi, listen, thank you very much and good morning, and I've had a chance to say hi and good morning to a number of you. I would rather done that than this. Okay? We could talk personally, but that's okay. Ravi, thanks for inviting me.
Absolutely.
What a wonderful place. So listen, Ravi, cautionary information, typical. We do not want to make forward-looking statements. If you need some more detail, please give us a call. Go online and there is a whole boilerplate now that is a freaking big page long. Go read it and figure out because we do not want to do anything wrong. Right, Jennifer?
Absolutely.
Okay. Let's talk a little bit about how we are doing in this quarter. Carload s are up around 5% this quarter, and it is a mix, which is nice. It is not just intermodal and what is happening with fuel prices and everything else. Actually, our industrial month to date, and I am giving you a number that is not public, but it will be public, n ow it is 5.2%. It is nice to see a cross-section of business, how we are moving it. Bottom line, I could sit here and talk about the metrics completely, but I am sure all of you guys know what I look at and what is real important.
Overall, the metrics at the start of this quarter were a little lower than last year because of incidents and things that we had happen impacting the railroad. Fundamentally, it was not what we were doing, and it has recovered nicely. We are in the mid-230s again in Car Velocity, the dwell under 20 hours. We are handling the increase in business without degrading our service product or degrading how we move. I am very happy with that. Listen, we keep on talking operating ratio, and some people misunderstand me when I talk about operating ratio. Absolutely, you want to have the best operating ratio that your railroad can deliver because of revenue, the type of revenue, and the cost structure that you have. I think we figured out a pretty good model to get to be the best in the industry. I think something like 300 or 400 basis points better than our next competitor, and we like that.
It gives us a different starting place when we are looking at how we bring business on, and that is real important to us. We do not lose sight of that, and we will continue to do everything we can to be able to keep it at the right place. I have said this 1,000 times. If you concentrate on a number, then you miss business or you make decisions that are bad for the long term. I am not the CEO of. They did not hire me as the CEO of operating ratio. They hired me as the CEO of Union Pacific, and that is what I do. Okay? Now, we are going to be the best. We want to stay at the top. We want to win, and it is all about how much business we can bring on that is fundamentally strong business for our company, and I like where we are.
Jennifer, any more sort of details?
No, I think you've hit really some of the high points, particularly around the volume side. Only things I'll add is when you look at what's really the driver of the growth, great to see that Industrial business, and that's been pretty broad-based across many of the segments within Industrial. You've got bulk that's down about 1%. It's pretty similar to what we saw in the second quarter where the low natural gas prices continue to impact the coal demand, but we're seeing very strong demand on the grain side of the world. We look for that to continue. We're getting into the harvest season in the Midwest, and it looks to be a pretty decent harvest in our served territory again. So that's good, and that should give us some sustainability on the grain side.
Then just going back to the intermodal piece, that really is the biggest driver of our growth here in the quarter, and so that does have a mixed impact t hat we just need to remind folks of because that domestic intermodal piece, good business, w e love the business, and we're probably looking at what's going to be our fifth consecutive quarter of records in terms of looking at it year-o ver- year. So even before the cycle started to change our service product and the way that we were going after and winning and developing business in that market has been shining through. But that will have a little bit of an impact on the mix.
You bet.
Jim's comments on the operations are spot on. We're handling it well. Our strategy with the surge resources is definitely helping us. That's definitely to our benefit, and we see strong core results with that. The only, I'll say, fly in the ointment is fuel.
Sure.
I'm sure everybody's talking to you about fuel, Ravi.
Yep.
Back in July, we thought we were maybe going to get a little bit of a reprieve. Since then it's ticked up pretty substantially. So we're probably going to average, I'd say around $4.25 or so for the quarter, the third quarter. But I have to say right now we're paying closer to $5.20, $5.30 a gallon. So it's come up pretty substantially, and obviously that has some short-term impact on our operating ratio. But again, the core business, the core fundamentals of what we do, Safety, Service, Operational Excellence . We're hitting on all cylinders there.
Yeah, you bet. You bet. Ravi I could go on further and fill this whole 27 minutes and 31 seconds-
They're not here to listen to me. They're here to hear from you
-on merger, but you know what? I'll leave it to you.
Oh.
I like where we are and the way to go, so all yours. Looking forward to the questions.
Great. Perfect. Maybe let's start with some of the macro and demand picture, and we'll come to M&A obviously in a second. But, actually, Jennifer, maybe we can just piggyback off of your fuel comments here. How do we think about that OR walk, 2Q to 3Q to 4Q, based on what you laid out, both in terms of the fuel lag that you guys have on the recovery side, but also potentially any tailwinds you might be seeing on incremental truck conversions as a result of that?
Yeah. So on the last part of your question, it certainly is benefiting us from just highlighting that stark difference in terms of the fuel efficiency between truck and rail. And, we believe that is starting to drive some conversions to the network over and above what maybe some of the cyclical changes are driving. So I do think that's a plus for us. In terms of the OR impact, I think we had about 120 basis point impact to our OR in the second quarter with fuel prices coming up t o where they're at now.
Yep.
Probably fair to say that it's going to be that big of an impact or bigger. But again, that's why I point back to the core. Core is very strong and continuing to see improvement.
Got it.
Well, Ravi, real quick. Fundamentally, at a higher fuel price, not as hot, is never good for the economy-
Sure
-in the long run.
Yep.
That's what you have to worry about, that's what you have to be prepared for, that's what we have to do. Now, we haven't seen it so far.
It's truly amazing, with the products that we're moving, other than some specific areas that you know are going to be reactive quicker, that we've seen a slowdown. It's interesting. It helps us bring more business in. We sure don't want to damage, and have the economy damaged by having high fuel prices and slowing some things down. But so far, we haven't seen it.
Understood. But going back to Jennifer's comments of the core being really strong here, obviously you're seeing mid-single digit volume growth. You raised the guidance last quarter. Is it fair to say that we are now out of the freight recession, and we have visibility of what's coming forward? Or to Jim's point, is that still a little bit of a risk?
I mean, it feels good right now.
Okay.
I think our customers are pretty bullish right now. When you look at order books, when you look at inventories, I think those point to some sustainability here in the demand.
Okay.
We feel good about that, other than watching, is there the possibility for some demand destruction with the high fuel?
Right.
Got it. On domestic intermodal itself, obviously the big theme of the conference has been the capacity tightness on the trucking side. Has that resonated with your customers, and is that driving a long-term pipeline of volumes coming your way? Or does it feel like shippers are being a little more opportunistic, just given how suddenly this kind of crept up on them?
Bottom line is it's a little bit of both.
Okay.
Okay? Let's get serious here. If they thought that they could have a better product and move it quicker some other way, they'd leave us real quick, a certain percentage that just came on.
Got it.
Okay? That's life.
Yep.
But the best way for us to keep them, high service product-
Yep.
-show them that we can deliver it, and the final receiver of the product, the true decision-maker, is real important.
Yep.
The shipper or the receiver, not the trucking company.
Yep.
Okay?
Got it. On the international intermodal side, obviously there's a lot of talk on the price gap now between the East and the West. How does that benefit you guys, and what is the Again, does it also seem transitory, or do you think there's more structural gains to be had there?
I think we'll see. It seems like there's different headwinds and tailwinds that tend to make that freight shift back and forth-
Yeah.
-between the two coasts, and I think that shows, going back to Jim's point about the optionality of these firms. They're going to look for their best option, best transit time, best overall price to delivery. But right now, I do think with some of the low water levels in the Panama Canal, some of the other things that are going on in the world, we are seeing a little benefit. Our international intermodal volumes are up a little bit here in the quarter. That's a positive for us.
You can sit there if you're in my job or Jennifer's job, and worry about things that you don't control, or you do look at things that you can control. The customers that are buying internationally, and when they look at their supply chain, if it's better for them to go to the East, they're going to go to the East. If it's better for them to go to the Gulf, it's go to the Gulf. If it's better for them to go. Our job to partner with, I'm here in the West Coast with Long Beach, and we have a great relationship, and L.A., who are supportive of our merger because they see the benefit, then we work, and that's why we're doing the things we're doing to be faster, more consistent, so that when people make decisions.
Yep.
Because it's a cost thing. It's a cost and service thing, right?
Yep.
Listen, I get different service when I go to McDonald's. No, I didn't take my wife. Some people remember me saying this, about was going to take my wife for-
The burger in the conference call
-right, for our anniversary to McDonald's. I did take her to a nice steakhouse in Omaha. But bottom line is, I go there for speed, quality, and that's what I get. But when I go to one of those $80 steakhouses for a- can you believe it? For a steak, 80 bucks. But at the end of the day, I expect something different. If it's not there, I'm going to go back and get an $8 Big Mac.
Sure.
Okay?
I don't think so, but sure.
I'm not real worried about the East Coast, West Coast, but that's why we want to merge.
Yep.
We're going to give people more optionality with a single line that'll take you across the country looking forward to it.
Yep. I'll come to the merger in just a second.
Oh, that's okay.
Thinking about $80 stakes and pricing here, obviously, what is happening in the truck market kind of gives you a pretty nice opportunity for intermodal pricing as well. You guys said that you think it will be a bigger opportunity next bid season for you guys. Can you just talk about how you see that rolling through mechanically, kind of cadence over the next few quarters?
Jennifer, why don't you take them through the sort of the three different models that we have, right?
Yeah.
Some of it is priced in on long-term contracts, so way to go.
Yep. I think the part you were just referring to, Ravi, is some of those longer-term contracts-
Yep.
-which we put some flexibility into the pricing, which has served us well because, at the time we won some of those contracts, you started to see the market tail off. What you are seeing now certainly is the volume come from those contracts, but the pricing will lag, and it will trail a little bit. Then you also have the business that moves on more of a spot basis. That bid season is in more the springtime of the year, and so since spring of 2026, prices have continued to run up. Assuming they stay at these levels or-
Yep.
-continue to go higher, we would expect a stronger bid season. Again, you are going to get the benefit of that more in the back half of 2027. Then the third piece that Jim is talking about is we have our own boxes.
That is the nice thing about our intermodal franchise, is we can hit the market in a number of different places. With our boxes, we actually have them fully unstacked, out and running for the first time since about 2008, or excuse me, 2018. Went back too far. Dropped a decade. But 2018, so that is a long time. We have actually gone out, and opportunistically picked up a few extra boxes, and we have put some surcharges on there as well to reflect the strong demand that we have for that part of our product. We are hitting on all of those cylinders, and it is being supported by the service product, so that is where we feel good.
Got it. You said the S word, so just given what is happening to fuel, is there an opportunity to maybe use surcharges and accessorials to maybe get pricing a little bit quicker? Especially given how extraordinary what is happening with fuel is.
Our fuel surcharges are programmatic. They're set up either through contracts with our customers, or through our tariffs, so they've been in that same situation for a very long time. They're just kind of set it and forget it. What I was referring to was some of the peak season surcharges-
Sure.
-that are lane specific, market specific, and intermodal-
Right.
-to address some of the capacity.
Got it. On peak itself, we've heard from a few trucking companies so far that they're looking forward to a very robust peak. Do you guys have a sense of what that's looking like just yet, or is it a little too soon?
I do not know. We think that the volume is not going to go up a whole bunch-
Okay.
-in those segments that are usually driven by peak. But I am hoping that everybody else is right, and not our experts.
Got it.
They are pretty decent levels right now.
Yeah.
That's the nice point.
Yeah. It's not negative-
No.
-but I don't see another substantial-
Yeah.
-double-digit increase.
Got it.
For sure.
I think a big message from you guys for the last two, three years during the downturn has been, "Hey, we have the capacity for when the volumes do come back." You have seen a pretty nice improvement in volumes already, kind of off the bottom here in the last couple of years. Where are you now on excess capacity on the service levels that you can maintain? At what point do you think you'll have to bring some resources back? This will be a high quality one.
Ravi, it's pretty simple, okay? What we did was starting in 2019, we looked at the railroad in a completely different manner of what was possible. We invested hundreds of millions of dollars in making our railroad to be able to handle trains of different lengths and in different corridors. As we publicly have said lots, we operate with more business than we did in 2019, with 24% less trains. Some people think that's a number you can just slap on the wall, and it was easy. That wasn't easy, but that's capacity that we have excess.
Sure.
If we're going to run seven new lanes in the merger, my God, we don't get back to where we were even in 2019.
Let alone the business that we have now.
We're very comfortable with that piece. And the other two areas that you always have to be careful with is locomotives. The reason is you just can't get them if you need them in a short period of time. Otherwise, the buffer would be zero. We'd just go down to the corner place and buy a locomotive, but nobody has them just sitting there for us-
Yep.
-and people. I'm very comfortable with capacity-wise. Few little pinch point areas that we'll continue to invest in.
On the intermodal side, Jennifer, we spent, I think, something like $1.2 billion in the last eight or nine years to increase our capacity, the number of lifts we put in there, on purpose to be able to handle these changes that we think that we can draw to our railroad as we move ahead. That's what we've done, is tried to touch every piece of our business to give ourselves the capacity to not run up against it. And you'll see that if you run up against it, you just slow down.
The railroad slows down-
Yep.
-which is not good.
Got it. Just to follow up from that topic very close to your heart, you mentioned it several times already today, which is service levels. How comfortable are you with where you are with service? What technology investments do you have to make to push that to a new level? And are you confident that will sustain even when these volumes come back?
Listen, let's just tag team this. We've invested on technology from gate technology. At technology, so truckers can come in seamlessly. They don't even have to stop. They slow down to come in and out of our terminals. The way we switch boxcars at the terminals, we've invested in technology that allows them to do more, so we're handling switch number of cars per hour, probably 20% better than we were before. We continue to invest.
We have taken all our main systems a nd replaced them with the latest in the last three or four years, whether it's the dispatch system, whether it's our fundamental NetControl. The best part about NetControl was, it was a little scary thing, and I had hoped that Lance had done it when he was the CEO, but he sort of left that for me and kept it building. They came to see me and said, "We're going to shut down our main system that runs everything off of it, payroll, cars, everything." I said to him, "Well, what's our backup? If that doesn't work or we have a glitch, what do we do?" He says, "You can't do anything because you can't meld the two." We're talking about hundreds of thousands of railcar movements and everything else, and we did it over a weekend. I give Rahul and his entire team accolades.
So we're ready to do what we have to do moving forward. I'm very comfortable where we are. Jennifer, anything to add, or did I cover it?
You covered a lot of it. We are continuing to develop both within our terminal systems, our Terminal Command Center, that's going to help prompt decisions originally to some of the managers in terms of how do they want to bring the trains into the yard, how do they want to set up the switch plans to make sure that the cars are making the next connection. Ultimately, you look forward, instead of just prompting the terminal manager, it's going to go ahead and make those decisions and send those instructions to the crew automatically. There's a lot ahead of us there that we can do to continue to get more productive and safer.
The most exciting thing that we are working on, and we're pretty close, is a dynamic operating plan.
It takes us a long time to change the operating plan against what happens with the business because you have so many things you have to worry about, assets, people, commitments, service plans, everything else. I'm telling you, we are very close. I'd like it so that the day after tomorrow we could have a new plan that fulfills what we have to do, but able to be able to run assets better and cheaper, size of trains and everything else. We're getting there. I'm not happy with Rahul on this one and hopefully he's listening in. I expected him to give it to me six months ago, and he thinks it's difficult. I don't know. It's pretty simple from where I sit. He just needs to get going on it.
You should take him for a run early in the morning.
Oh, he's too fast.
Yeah.
He's a marathoner. Son of a gun. I would have to trip him to beat him, for sure. He is fast, Rahul. Fast.
Never mind. I have a few more questions on financials and some thematic topics, so I'll come to that in the end. Maybe let's talk about the merger now. First of all, congratulations. The STB obviously has removed the proceedings from abeyance, resumed consideration of the merger on merits-
Yes. Thank you.
-accepted the applications. How do you view this latest milestone? How should investors think of it? And give us a sense of what do you think the timeline and the next steps are from here?
Well, listen, we are very happy to cross that threshold because once the STB on May 28th accepted the merger application, then the clock starts. This next piece is the merits and the parties that have an issue with what we're doing get to put in, but they have to put in their detail.
They have to tell the STB and make it public what it is that they can't just speak. It's like some railroads are out there saying that we end up with 50% of the business. That's just a lie. It just is a lie. Burlington Northern Santa Fe, owned by Berkshire, big company, they have more gross ton miles than us. So we're number two on gross ton miles. Yes, our revenue's more. You'll have to ask them why. That's up to them. Not up to me. Okay? And our operating metrics are better, everything else, but bottom line, that's where we are. CSX and Norfolk Southern are about the same. So if you put number two and three or two and four together, you don't get to 50%.
Somebody forgot that there's two Canadian railroads that actually operate in the U.S. So you add them in there, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, and we end up at 40. The reason I'm telling you this story is they can't go about telling the STB that we get to 50 without proving their math. And I don't know what math people are taking, but it's just wrong.
I even heard it yesterday-
Yeah.
-at IANA. Son of a gun. The good part about it is, I love where we are without being too snarky.
Sure.
I apologize if I woke up a little snarky this morning. Bottom line is, I like where we are in the process. It's taken us way too long to get here, but if anybody's worked with government regulators, it takes them a while to get through to the right place you want them. I'm going to look at it from their side. I think they're being very cautious in making sure that they do the right thing as they go through the process. I think the chair and both the members, all three members, sorry, are smart and they'll make the right decision because they see the benefit for America-
Yep.
-and the benefit for the shippers and the benefit for America to win against worldwide competition. I love it where we are. We have a timeline now called May 28th next year.
They get 30 days to give us a decision. Now, again, this is Jim Vena. I'm hoping they make the decision in two days. So on the 1st of June, we have an answer, but I bet you any money they don't take two days, Ravi.
We shall see.
Jennifer, anything you want to add on that?
No.
I think I covered it off.
I think you covered it off.
Jim, you guys have not been sitting still waiting for them. At the same time, you offered a number of concessions already. You obviously had the agreement with Canadian National. Can you just talk about the thought process there, kind of why you did that, and what benefits do you think it will give you through the process?
Well, listen, you can go study history all you want, all the way back on mergers and anything else, and you need to deal with concentration of railroad against customers, and that is what we had. When the merger gets consummated, we would end up with three rail tracks between our two that we have today, plus we would take over the Norfolk Southern one. We needed to do something with that. You cannot have that.
Either we make a deal with somebody, and I give Canadian National and Tracy and the whole team there a lot of credit. They could see the value of what they do. They are going to be able to move intermodal from Canada into there if they want to Kansas City, and I think it is wonderful. It is competition, and they might take a little business away from us. Now, they better be good or we are going to try to keep it, right?
But at the end of the day, I love that. With that, we started talking about the terminal issues, whether it's the TRRA. The STB came back twice and asked us on the TRRA, even though we said, "Listen, we don't want to control it." What people miss, there's terminal railroads and cooperation agreements within terminals across the U.S.
They are all run with one thing when the railroads own them. It's a non-profit. It's not there to make money. It's there to switch a rail car for the cheapest price going, and that's how we manage it, all of us. We fixed TRRA with this, and we fixed the Kansas City. So it's good for CN. It expands their reach. We had to fix that. If you look at our network now, it's a bolt-on.
Sure.
Would I make a deal with another railroad? Absolutely. It would have to be a win-win for Union Pacific and for them. They could see what the benefit is. The idea to give up tracks of your railroad for no reason at all just goes against the fundamental principle of how business should work. On top of that, this is what it would do. If we allowed X railroad to run on our railroad for 800 mi, we would charge them a per car mile charge that actually would make it more expensive for them to get to that destination. I have thought about just about agreeing. Because guess what? We would just reset the price higher for us.
Sure.
Okay? That doesn't make a particle of sense in business.
In business, it should be who can get the best and what the market allows you to do. That's why I am going to have a hard time making a deal with anybody else.
But if it's there. One piece of the deal that's really interesting, Ravi, is we gave Canadian National access from Canada to Mexico.
Yep.
Through Memphis.
Yep.
Man, I can hardly wait. We win by them growing Canadian business to Mexico.
Got to love the competition. We just added to Canada against the Canadian Pacific.
Right.
Love it. I didn't get a phone call thanking me about, "That was a great deal for you, Jim, and bad for CN.
We shall see how this plays out. Jim, can you give us the latest insight into the conversations you're having with various stakeholders here, folks who called you in support of the deal, folks who called you with concerns? What's the latest update on there?
You bet. So we have over 2,000 groups or individuals that are positive on the merger, letters of support. We have over 500 customers, and just a couple of days ago, the governor from South Carolina sent a letter in, and we have letters continuing to come in. So the support is the, and it's the most support that anybody's had on a merger. So, we're very happy, and it's across state lines all over the place.
And we have some detractors that have said that they put in, but at the end of the day, the positive is much stronger than the negative b ecause they see the benefit of being able to operate through. So we're continuing. I wrote a letter to the top 50 customers, CEOs, myself, and said, "Listen, if there's anything that you want to talk to me that you don't understand, this is my personal phone number. This is me. Give me a call." And a couple of them have. And we've actually had great conversations and we'll probably get a couple letters of support from them.
Okay.
Some of the rest of them, I haven't heard from them, that means they must support me.
Sign off your socks.
I got it. It's not quite. But at the end of the day, communicate with our customers because that's real important.
It's hard to communicate against associations. They don't pay anything.
Sure.
So it's pretty hard to have a proper discussion, plus I can't tell them exactly what we're doing with some of our customers.
They're an association. So I like it. Other stakeholders, son of a gun, I'm telling you if there's one thing I really screwed up on, I did not know I was going to have to make so many trips to different government offices somewhere in this country over this. I've done lots of, myself, Jennifer, and the entire team to make sure the story is straight. They get it. As soon as you tell them, how'd you like an airline industry that never went across the country? How'd you like an interstate system where when 80 gets to the Mississippi River, there's no road bridge across.
You have to barge it across the cars over to the other side so you can get to the other part of the country. They get it as soon as you tell them that. So I love it.
Yeah.
Lots of communication.
Good analogy there. Any questions from the room? Madison, you can go first. Is there a mic? Here.
Okay. I love it.
Here. Right up here.
Oh, there is a question?
Yes.
Okay. I thought I was going to get off the stage two minutes and 47 earlier.
No, sir. We are not letting you off.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the question. Mine is actually on autonomous trucking. I was wondering what your view is on it more broadly. Do you see it as a competitive risk or opportunity for railroads? As autonomous trucks increasingly become a reality, and if it does come to pass, how can rails close the gap on the value offered to customers?
It's been a big topic of the conversation so far.
Listen, this is something that we should always think about in the business that we're in, and I do think about it lots. If you stand still, someone else is going to beat you. You got to look at what's coming up and you got to look forward. We're not into defragmenting, or fragmenting our railroad network to have 48 railroads like we had back in the Second World War, class ones. We want to move ahead because our competitors are moving ahead, and that is one of the reasons we've looked at this merger and we think it's so important for the country is the competition's going to get better and we need to be able to get better and have a chance to win. I've actually ridden in an autonomous truck, and I'm telling you, the technology's there on the road system.
I do everything I can. I know for an old guy, 68 years old, and people might say, by the time you get to 68-year-old grizzled and you only look at things a certain way. If there's technology out there, I got my IT guy going to get me a flip phone from Apple because I want to see what that technology does. Plus, I think it's cool. At the end of the day, I ride Waymo. I ride Teslas that are autonomous. I go trucks. I don't fool around, Aurora, I've been in there. It's a few years ago.
I'm telling you, the technology's there.
Okay? They are driving right now with somebody in the seat, but hang on, okay? We need to be able to be smart enough to move ahead. If we stay the same, we just lose business because-
Right.
-they are going to be competitively more efficient than us, and they stretch that mileage of how far they can haul.
Got it.
If people want more trucks on the road, then I guess don't let us do the things that we need to do as a rail industry to move ahead. That's what's real important.
You referenced the transaction in relation to that. Do you think that is going to be part of the debate, kind of, hey, autonomous trucks are coming. It will help the rails compete better or how do you think that will relate to the transaction?
Well, listen, I know the five key areas that the STB needs to look at.
Public interest is the very first thing, and it is pretty hard for them not to look at everything that is coming up.
Yep.
You want a railroad that seamlessly can operate between the East Coast and the West Coast without handing off and being, even in intermodal, 8- 24 hours faster and less complication, less handling, safer because every time you touch something, it costs you something. Something could happen. Do you want to have a railroad system that allows you to compete against that truck?
Yep.
Or do you want not to? Listen, that's why this merger is going to get approved. There's no question. It's good for the country. It is good for the customer. Single-line railroad costs less. Rates are less on a single-line railroad haul today than anybody that has a multiple railroad touch. That means that we can offer better. Now, I'm not here telling people expect a 5% rate cut because my job is to represent my company.
Sure.
But if we market-wise everything else, we could do that and still be able to do what we have to. So it is, Ravi, it truly is a great deal for America.
Great. That's a great spot to wrap it up, Jim. Always fun, always insightful. Thank you so much for being here. Jennifer as well.
Ravi, thank you very much. Thanks, everyone.