With the cut, cut, chop, chop mentality of the last 5 plus years will UP ever see consistent 160k car loadings per week again, or is the best behind us and we are doing nothing more than managing the decline?
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Wonderful Warren Buffet might step in and “merge” with BNSF for the right price of $100/$120 a share and some government bailout/ special deal when it finally collapses
The busiest I saw was in 2007 and we had some weeks in the 240,000 carloads. We will never get back to that
It's "How we win together."
The CN, CN+UP+ferromex. One railroad across 3 countries. Heard tin foil hat types have been saying there is a good chance that on the other side of all this global political turmoil that there are groups that want canada to finally break from britain and become part of the US.
Uhhhh! Who is going to buy the UP?
UP will become CSX.
UPSUX..
Railroads that I’ve seen in this shape typically merge in order to survive. The SP, CNW and more recently the KCS were all run into the ground before being sold off. The problem is who is going to by UP when all of the class ones are being run into the ground?
Everything mentioned below is the UPs way of the "How we Win Together" plan. What a joke!
Remember when carloadings were 180-over 200k per week and things moved and the railroad still made BILLIONS? Now the yards can't process what we have. They are pushing stuff out and double handling block swaps online just to show the cars are out of the yard. Inbound trains are stripped of power in a siding outside of terminals with customers product sitting for days before its brought in and switched out for final destination. There is no precision scheduled anything anymore, just chaotic reaction with no real plan. Lots of recrews, lots of locomotive failures, lots of 14 hour tie ups, lack of vans, lack of mechanical and engineering resources, etc.
Not all locations are the same (even tho d-mbed down managers use bad matrixes to try and manage them the same). Where I work we couldn't handle even a slight up tick in traffic. The track is falling apart. Locomotives break down every other day. Dispatcher is spread so thin it takes em 20+mins just to look at a request for time. Growing is gonna be the next groups problem.
PSR has gutted UP's infrastructure to the point that growing the business is too costly. They've sold off assets for pennies that will take real dollars to replace... We cannot process the traffic at either end so their only answer is to slow velocity to a crawl and run off business by raising rates.
@fwk-You are absolutely correct. Growing a business means investing in the business. Vena and the shareholders don’t want to do that, because it’s a risk and you also have to wait before you see returns. They want their money NOW!
I doubt it. The current execs don't care about growing the business. We should easily be close to the 200k mark. The last 10 years of glorified incompetence has all but assured that it won't happen.