CSX Corporation

Thank you, Krista. Hello and good afternoon, everyone. We're very pleased to have you join our first quarter conference call. Joining me from the leadership team are Joe Hendricks, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Corey, EVP and Chief Operating Officer, Kevin Boone, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer, and Sean Pelkey, EVP and Chief Financial Officer. In the presentation accompanying this call, which is available on our website, you will find slides with our forward-looking disclosures and our non-GAAP disclosures for your review. With that, it is now my pleasure to introduce Mr. Joe Hendricks. Joe Hendricks All right.

Thank you, Matthew, and whoever won. Thank you for joining our first quarter call. Since I came to CSX, we have been clear about our commitment to lead with service. Consistent, reliable, excellent service is what shareholders, strengthens our relationships with customers, expands our markets, and ultimately drives proper growth. Now fulfill that commitment this quarter. The start of the year typically brings operational challenges that we manage the network through the worst of winter weather. These challenges will be more difficult this year because of the constraints associated with our two major infrastructure projects, the Howard Street Tunnel and the Blue Ridge Subdivision rebuild. Unfortunately, our performance fell short of our expectations. As a result, we left good business on the table, reduced our revenues, and our inefficiencies meant we incurred more expense. We take full accountability for our performance this quarter, and we are not standing still. The team is aligned, our expectations are clear, and we are taking actions to stabilize our operations, improve efficiency, and enhance coordination across the entire OneCSX team. All that said, I want to reiterate the underlying strengths of our business. This is still the same great network and OneCSX team. Our customer relationships are strong, and the fundamentals of our strategy are sound. I want to thank our employees for their resilience and our investors for their continued support as we move forward with urgency and clarity. Now, let's go over some highlights. Let's start with slide one, where we feature some of the key results from our first quarter. Total volume decreased 1% compared to last year, but we did see intermodal volumes increase 2% on the quarter as we saw an uptick in port traffic. Total revenue was $3.4 billion for the quarter, down 7% from the same period last year. As we anticipated, much of this decline was due to the commodity effects of lower benchmark coal prices and reduced fuel surcharge. Earnings per share decreased by 24%, reflecting the effects of our margin from reduced revenues and our challenge network performance. I know that trust is earned through consistency. One quarter doesn't define us. What defines us is how we respond, how we learn, and how we come back stronger. That is our focus. We are committed to delivering better results, and most importantly, to executing in the quarters ahead. Now I will turn the call over to Mike to provide details around our operational performance.

Thank you, Joe. And thanks to all of you for taking the time to participate today. As Joe highlighted in his opening remarks, this was a difficult quarter for the CSX network and the team. We've talked about how we have two major infrastructure rebuilds in progress that are causing us to reorganize and reroute a significant amount of our daily traffic. As a result, we were hit by severe weather and faced other tough railroading challenges. It has become more complicated for us to recover and is just taking us longer to stabilize our operations. These effects are clear in our service metrics, as all of you have noticed. Let me say this as firmly as I can, improving the fluidity of the network is essential in order to deliver on our promises to our customers, and we are committed to getting this done. We expect our performance to improve from first quarter, even as we manage the ongoing infrastructure projects. I'll talk more in a moment about what steps we're taking, but let's first discuss safety results for the quarter. The first quarter saw a third straight sequential decline in our FRA injury rate, which also brought us lower on a year-over-year basis. The continued education and mentorship programs that we've put in place are having a measurable effect, helping our employees understand how to reduce their risk exposure every day that they're on the job. I'm pleased that our F4A train accident rate also declined sequentially and improved year over year. Our team sees this as an encouraging affirmation that our Safe CSX program is taking hold and driving positive results. We will continue our work to build a safety-focused culture here at CSX. always with the goal of everyone returning home safe and sound after every day. Let's move to the next slide. At the top of this page, you'll see metrics reflecting our network fluidity. After working through the storms in the second half of 2024, our velocity was affected early in the first quarter of 2025 after closing the Baltimore Tunnel, and it continued to be challenged as we managed through the after effects of harsh winter weather. Well demonstrated a similar unfavorable trend over the last several weeks, As yard congestion persisted, making it difficult for trains to depart on schedule. We're working hard to address the increase in cars online as having excess inventory has slowed the network. With particular flooding on our southwest and midwest regions, Nashville and Cincinnati in particular, we have much to do in this regard. The charts on the bottom show important customer facing metrics. Our intermodal business is highly service sensitive. We have to get this right to stay competitive in this market. As this chart shows, our internal trip plan compliance rebounded nicely in the first quarter after the hurricane-related disruptions that hit last fall. The team has worked hard to keep our terminals fluid and minimize the amount of time drayage drivers are waiting to drop off or pick up boxes. We're encouraged by this result, but we didn't do nearly as well with carload TPC, which was negatively impacted from the quarter's fluidity constraints. This is a primary area of attention for the team, We have to deliver here in order to support our current merchandise business and the substantial amount of new business that Kevin and his team won and expect to win going forward. Finally, our CSD, or first mile, last mile measure, shows fairly steady performance, but we know that for our customers, every percentage point represents important freight that they've entrusted to CSX. So we understand where we are, and we are certainly committed to getting back to where we need to be. Top to bottom, our team is focused on speeding our operations back up and rebuilding the positive momentum that comes from a fluid, balanced network. We know we're not going to get back to our true potential until we get these major projects completed, but we are doing the hard work to drive incremental improvement step by step as we go through the year. One of the first things we're doing is to get the resources in place that will enable us to run a consistent operating plan, even with the two major closures to work around. We're bringing online a modest number of locomotives to help get the network in balance and reduce train delay. This is scheduled railroading. When trains leave on schedule, everything else is able to fall in place. We're also taking steps to drive our asset utilization. Our field leaders are connecting with our customers to identify and flush cars off our network. As cars accumulated, network fluidity declined, so we're working closely with our customers and taking immediate action to get these levels back to where they need to be. We're making sure that everyone in this organization acts according to the priority that we at CSX place on delivering customer service. There's no single measure for the railroad that accounts for everything, but for years, TPC has served us as a very good guide to effective statistics. When we miss, we hold ourselves accountable, find a solution, and make it right with our customers. We have a lot of work to do, but remember this. We have the same people and the same assets that we had a year ago, and we take a lot of pride in knowing how to apply the core principles of an effective scheduled railroad. On top of that, we're adding improved tools such as the real time operations portal system that we previewed at our investor day. Hundreds of railroaders across the network use our top every day to strengthen communication and support faster, more effective decision making. The bottom line is that we're aligned across the team and we're going to deliver for our customers and our shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to you, Kevin.