CSX Corporation

All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers have marked, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, please press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would like to turn the conference over to Matthew Korn, head of investor relations and strategy. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Colby. Good afternoon, everyone. We're very pleased to have you join our third quarter earnings call. Joining me from the CSX leadership team are Steve Angel, 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 that accompanies this call, which is available on our website, you will find slides with our forward-looking and non-GAAP disclosures. We encourage you to review them. With that, I'm very happy to turn the call over to Mr. Steve Angel.

Thank you, Matthew. Hello, everyone. We're happy to have you join our third quarter calls today. First, I want to recognize Joe Henricks. He led this company through some difficult times and worked with this leadership team to make some real progress. Now we are all eager to move forward from a solid position. My connection to this industry goes way back. My career started at GE where I worked directly with locomotives and rail operations. That experience gave me a deep appreciation for railroading that has stayed with me. I spent the last couple of decades leading large industrial companies, specifically industrial gas companies, but the interest in rail never faded. There are some similarities between the industrial gas business and the railroad industry. First of all, safety. It isn't just a nice thing to do. It is a sacred responsibility. Everyone must come home safe at the end of each and every workday. Industrial gas and railroads are both capital-intensive businesses. Our strategy at Lindy was to build network density in targeted geographies. That is how you leverage your infrastructure to generate ever-higher returns on capital. That concept applies to the railroad industry as well. I think of pipelines and railway track the same way. He who owned the pipelines, provided they were in the right locations, had a strong advantage over their competition. Same for railroad tracks. Another similarity is our vision. At Lindy, our vision is to be the best performing industrial gas company in the world. And we achieve that in some cases by a large margin over the next best competitor. At CSX, our vision is to be the best performing railroad in North America. I like that. And when we say best performing, I'm certainly talking about financial performance, operating margins, return on capital, cash flow. But I'm also talking about safety, customer service, employee engagement, integrity and ethics. And I don't see any of these as being mutually exclusive. You can be best in class in all these areas, in every important aspect of running a great railroad company. How do you do it? It takes a concerted effort. Sounds trite, but you have to make the most important things the most important things. Focus, execute, grind the details, repeat. Build a strong, stable foundation and get better every day. In essence, you build a discipline, high-performance culture, and you build a talent pipeline that will sustain the culture long after you're gone. That's enough about me. I'll turn it over to Mike.