(The Tampa Tribune posted the following article by Ted Jackovics on its website on February 3.)
TAMPA, Fla. — Chuck McBride showed up at CSX Transportation Inc.’s railroad yard in Mulberry at 4 a.m. to visit with crews heading out of Polk County’s Bone Valley phosphate range.
By noon, McBride, manager of railroad activities for Central and South Florida, could take a minute from delivering his primary message — safety.
He chose to reminisce about a man known as “Boxcar” Carter, who earned a niche in railroad lore his first day at work.
“Boxcar” was to report on trains as they rolled by so a dispatcher could track shipments.
“No one explained he was supposed to get the numbers of the freight cars,” McBride said, “so he spent all day long just dictating ‘Box car, box car, box car,” into his tape recorder.”
The sights, sounds and stories at Mulberry are much the same today as 40 and more years ago, the Seaboard Air Lines Railroad marshaled the phosphate trains.
But CSX Corp., which swept in Seaboard and the Chessie System in a 1980 merger, has embarked on a program to distance itself from the good old days — even those as recent as 2000.
The movement began with John Snow, chairman and chief executive officer of CSX Corp., confirmed Thursday as U.S. treasury secretary. To underscore his desire to focus corporate attention on rail operations, Snow divested the company of holdings as diverse as the Grand Teton Lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and an international shipping container company.
CSX Corp. President Michael Ward was named Friday to succeed Snow as chairman and chief executive officer. Analysts credit Ward with many of the recent initiatives.
As one of America’s four largest freight railroads, CSX Corp. is re-emphasizing familiar goals: Improve service. Cut costs. Promote safety.
Take “Boxcar” Carter’s task. The seemingly simple job of tracking railroad cars and reassigning shipments that have fallen behind schedule has befuddled plenty of railroaders.
In April 2000, CSX Transportation, a part of CSX Corp., met its “right car/right train” objectives 67.5 percent of the time. During the first nine months of 2002, the company improved that average to 84 percent.
On-time arrivals have improved from 42.2 percent to 80 percent.
Initiatives like McBride’s predawn visit to assure conductors and engineers the brass wouldn’t care if they didn’t move another car until they were sure it was safe lowered personal injuries systemwide from about 19 a week in 2000 to about 12 a week in 2002.
Some fresh ideas have evolved in the Tampa region, where phosphate remains the railroad’s mainstay despite overseas competition in the fertilizer business.
CSX Transportation is experimenting with remote-controlled locomotives at a Tampa yard in the belief they will improve safety and lower costs.
This year the company plans to provide freight train conductors with wireless handheld devices to better track overnight domestic deliveries.
A Tampa maintenance yard has converted 385 hoppers that carried phosphate rock into taller cars to handle bigger loads of the much lighter processed fertilizer products.
Bigger loads mean fewer cars and quicker loading and unloading.
But much of the new order at CSX Transportation goes beyond technology to rethinking how to sell its services.
“We have recognized the phosphate industry is not as strong as it once was,” says Bruce Curtis, director of marketing for the railroad’s Tampa-based Florida Business Unit. The company is working with manufacturers and buyers to find new markets for Florida products.
The company tries to find customers who aren’t located along rail lines. Those companies might do business by rail if CSX set up truck terminals to unload freight cars and make deliveries, what is termed “TransFlo” by CSX. It is one of the initiatives aimed at redesigning the rail business to cut into the trucking industry’s market.
“We can get a load from Tampa to Hagerstown, Md., but it’s important for us to discover what company 20 miles away from Hagerstown wants a product from Florida, and build a service for them,” says Curtis.
In another expansion effort, the company expects to inaugurate a weekly train from Canada to IMC Phosphates’ New Wales plant in Polk County by June. It will deliver sulfur to be used in making fertilizer and supplant 280 weekly truck trips, a coup in efforts to get shippers to switch to rail. The project is a collaboration between CSX, the supplier and IMC to build a terminal able to unload the 70-car sulfur trains.
The Tampa area is a microcosm of CSX Transportation operations across 23 states.
Tampa hosts businesses in each of CSX’s primary railroad categories: automobile deliveries; coal; intermodal service with piggy-back cars that carry truck trailers and cargo containers; and general merchandise trains.
Several trains leave from Bradenton’s Tropicana plant to the New York and Cincinnati areas, but more than half of the 30 trains that move through Tampa each day involve phosphate. Phosphate accounted for $306 million, or 4.3 percent of CSX Transportation’s nationwide revenue in 2001.
The phosphate operation in Florida uses 2,400 railroad cars, the Mulberry, Lakeland and Rockport yards, two car repair shops and a locomotive maintenance shop.
The Rockport terminal at the Port of Tampa can unload 1,600 tons of diammonium phosphate an hour. A dumper flips modified hoppers and their 94-ton loads of diammonium phosphate upside down, one at a time.
A wooden warehouse more than three times the length of a football field can store phosphate products scheduled for later transfer to cargo ships.
CSX Transportation owns Rockport, but also has rail lines into other terminals along the Gulf coast.
CSX Transportation innovations come against a backdrop of promising times for its parent company, CSX Corp.
The parent company is profitable although it needs to show growth to improve stock prices and return for shareholders.
The cumulative five-year return on a $100 investment in CSX made in December 1996 stood at $96 by December 2001. That compares with a return of $126 for the Dow Jones transportation index over the same period.
CSX Corp. has survived the turbulent merger in 1999 with half of the Conrail network and posted eight quarters of improved service measures and six quarters of year-over-year operating income through September.
On Thursday, the company reported 2002 income of $424 million, or $1.99 a share, compared with $293 million or $1.38 per share in 2001.
A key to improved financial performance is, as always, customer satisfaction.
“What really drives the business between us and the railroad is the supply of hopper cars,” says Patrick Harmon, North American transportation and logistics manager for Cargill Fertilizer.
“CSX has become much more focused in forecasting and [anticipating] what the customer will do,” Harmon says. Most important, he says, is getting Cargill’s product to customers on time.
So McBride must continue to improve performance among the 1,000 Florida
CSX Transportation employees.
“The work has gotten better,” says conductor Ronnie Thomas, who began his career in 1962 and retires this month. “If I were young, I’d do it again.”