Norfolk Southern Corporation

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Norfolk Southern Corporation first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, note that all participant lines are in the listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. And if at any time during the call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. Also note that this call is being recorded on Wednesday, April 23, 2025. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Luke Nichols. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone. Please note that during today's call, we will make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements relate to future events or future performance of Norfolk Southern Corporation, which are subject to risks and uncertainties and may differ materially from actual results. Please refer to our annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC for a full disclosure of those risks and uncertainties we view as the most important. Our presentation slides are available at NorfolkSouthern.com in the Investors section, along with our reconciliation of any non-GAAP measures used today to the comparable GAAP measures, including adjusted or non-GAAP operating ratio. Please note that all references to our prospective operating ratio during today's call are being provided on an adjusted basis. Turning to slide three, it's my pleasure to introduce Norfolk Southern's President and Chief Executive Officer, Mark George.

Good morning, and thank you everyone for joining. Representing Norfolk Southern with me today are John Orr, our Chief Operating Officer, Ed Elkins, our Chief Commercial Officer, and Jason Zampi, our Chief Financial Officer. We're looking forward to updating you on our Q1 2025 results. There's a lot to be pleased with this quarter as we delivered results in line with what we signaled to you while dealing with a vicious winter, including 18 storms that were far more consequential to our network than Helene was last fall. John will share details on that impact and how we quickly restored fluidity to our network in order to serve our customers with minimal disruption. Our network resiliency was evident again, thanks to great planning and execution by our team. And we did it safely with lower injury and accident rates as our team continues to embrace safety as a core value. Despite all this disruption and absorbing $35 million of storm restoration costs that Jason will detail, we delivered 8% EPS growth on an adjusted basis. driven in part by $55 million of labor productivity savings. I'd like to thank every member of the Thoroughbred team for their hard work and dedication during the quarter. Teamwork and a focus on safety and service excellence are what's propelling our progress. We're also proud of our commercial agility, staying close to our customers as we and they dealt with weather-related impacts to operations east coast port rebalancing, and volume fluctuations in anticipation of tariffs. Our behaviors and performance are increasing our customers' confidence in our service product, and that's driving meaningful share gains. We're doing a better job anticipating market and customer needs, taking on the right long-term growth opportunities in the most strategic lanes, We are dressed and ready to handle volume growth. Overall, Norfolk Southern is doing what we set out to do. We remain focused on what we can control, that's safety, network performance, customer service, and costs. I'll hand it off to the team now to provide more color on the results, starting with John.