NORFOLK, Va. — Norfolk Southern Railway Company has fully implemented a new scheduled operating plan for its merchandise freight service network that provides customers with substantial improvements in service consistency and reliability, the railroad said in a press release.
Southern builds trains and operates its rail network, improving on-time performance, reducing car handling, shortening routes, accelerating train speeds and boosting asset utilization. TOP uses 250 new train schedules and routings for shipments of chemicals, agricultural and consumer goods, paper and forest products, metals and construction materials and vehicles and vehicle parts. The new plan reduces or eliminates handlings at Norfolk Southern’s 13 major classification yards and more than 200 regional and local yards.
“We’ve redesigned our train operating plan, making our complex rail network simpler and more efficient for handling current traffic patterns and business levels,” said Steve C. Tobias, vice chairman and chief operating officer.
Some 75 percent of Norfolk Southern’s merchandise customers will see improvements in transit times. Most should experience improvements between 10 and 30 percent, and others will see even greater reductions in transit times. For example, transit time between Birmingham, Ala., and Allentown, Pa., has improved by more than 36 hours. Service between New Orleans and the Carolinas has improved by as many as 72 hours, and shipments moving from Pittsburgh to the Chicago area now arrive as many as 48 hours faster.
“TOP is a commitment by Norfolk Southern to our customers to provide strengthened levels of service and heightened dependability,” said Don Seale, senior vice president merchandise marketing. “With TOP’s enhancements, we are convinced we can provide unprecedented levels of service excellence and quality.”
Since TOP has been implemented, many customers have seen a dramatic improvement in Norfolk Southern’s service. “It’s been an incredible turnaround,” said Bill Kirk, president and CEO of Associated Asphalt Co., in Roanoke, Va., which ships liquid asphalt from the Midwest to Virginia and the Carolinas. Transit times were reduced from 13 to six days.
“These improvements equate to dollars and cents,” Kirk said. “The less we have to spend to reheat the asphalt because of delays in transit times helps reduce our costs as well as helps us achieve better rail car utilization.”
PCS Transportation Director Mike Sylvester said his company, which moves fertilizer and sulfur between Lee Creek, N.C., and Chicago, is now receiving shipments in five days vs. seven days. “This enables us to handle more business with fewer cars and increases our efficiency,” Sylvester said.
TOP is the result of an extensive yearlong analysis of train operations by Norfolk Southern transportation, marketing and information technology personnel. The process involved rebuilding every merchandise traffic pattern on the railroad. NS studied more 2.8 million carloads of traffic over a three-month period to see how traffic varied from day to day. The new operating plan was created with the assistance of MultiModal Applied Systems and its MultiRail software.
“TOP sets the stage for business growth in 2002,” Seale said. “With our service realignment, we are confident that we can be more competitive in the rail marketplace while attracting truck business from the highways as well as growing our overall business.”
Concurrent with TOP, Norfolk Southern has launched a number of e-commerce initiatives to make doing business with the company easier, including an enhancement to the current price inquiry application to allow customers to request new pricing information more quickly. Later this year, customers will be able to access a new Web-based application that will provide estimated transit times based on TOP train service schedules, and estimated arrival times on active shipments will be added to all shipment tracking applications.
Norfolk Southern Corporation is a Virginia-based holding company with headquarters in Norfolk. It owns a major freight railroad, Norfolk Southern Railway Company, which operates approximately 21,500 route miles in 22 states, the District of Columbia and the province of Ontario.