At RailTrends, CPKC and UP CEOs talk about higher levels of rail service

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Two Class 1 railroad CEOs wrapped up the day at RailTrends. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)
Two Class 1 railroad CEOs wrapped up the day at RailTrends. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

NEW YORK – The RailTrends conference in New York has been called the greatest single collection of rail investors in one place, and it has featured in recent years a level of introspection by an industry that hasn’t grown much despite regular promises to do so.

But the event this year wrapped up Friday with presentations from two Class 1 railroad CEOs – Keith Creel of Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) and Jim Vena of Union Pacific – that were generally upbeat after a year or more of railroad performance that most industry members would agree could signal better days ahead.

This is the second RailTrends conference following the formal merger of Canadian Pacific (NASDAQ: CP) and Kansas City Southern in March 2023. Creel received the Railroad Innovator award at the conference from Progressive Railroading, one of the sponsors of RailTrends. His acceptance speech gave him an opportunity to talk about the service offerings that came from the combination of CP with its Canadian system and Kansas City Southern’s north-south orientation from the U.S. Midwest down into Mexico.

The Midwest Mexico Express – “a train that originates in Chicago every day, goes deep into Mexico to a place called San Luis Potosi, deep into the industrial heartland of Mexico” – takes four days and is “trucklike reliable,” Creel said.

“That’s a key word if you want to enjoy growth in this industry, shaking our age-old probably earned and deserved reputation of being unreliable,” Creel said. Putting the Mexico Express into the market has yielded “tremendous growth,” he added.

But more significantly, according to Creel, it has established “the gold star for what is possible and allowed us an innovative platform to go into customers, go into business partners, some of whom we’ve never had business with before, to talk about new opportunities.”

Creel went further, talking about a 6,000-mile trip that also would be possible with the merger of the two railways.

He began in Saint John, a city in New Brunswick, Canada, across the border with Maine. He said it was the closest “tidewater” port to several cities, including Toronto, Montreal and Chicago and therefore more competitive in some ways with the larger Canadian Port of Halifax.

Creel imagined a container of diapers coming into Saint John, “putting it in a CPKC box car, taking it all the way down to Texas.”

“There are a lot of diapers being consumed with babies in Texas, which is a growing population center,” he added. “Think about down in Texas, when that container gets empty, you can take the same container and fill it with cotton that is being consumed at Mexican textile facilities that are in and around San Luis Potosi.”

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