Slower first quarter

This was a quick blurb and picture in the Wall ST Journal Jornal with CSX this week. Thurs paper said they idled about 100 locomotives and furloughed about 280 employees with general slow down of coal traffic recently.

Despite the hit CSX took on 1Q12 coal business, overall volume was up 1% with merchandise and intermodal gains offsetting coal losses. Record 1st quarter operating ratio of 71.1.

QB 52.32 wrote:Despite the hit CSX took on 1Q12 coal business, overall volume was up 1% with merchandise and intermodal gains offsetting coal losses. Record 1st quarter operating ratio of 71.1.

It's also hitting different regions differently. Obviously they're going to have more slack space and cutbacks in the divisions much more heavily skewed to coal traffic. But that's also not offset so much by additional hires and power in regions where intermodal is taking off because that's where the company has made more recent investments in efficiency...fewer employees working higher volumes, yard consolidations, capacity improvements for hauling more goods with the same power. Boston, for example, is going to be seeing layoffs with the relocation of Beacon Park ops to Worcester and probably static number of trains. But Worcester's going new-new-new with automation and these static number of trains go double-stack within the year, so that's a whole lot more throughput and revenue that's not going to show up at all on a news blurb zeroing in on headcount, active power count, and focus on non-growing legacy business they're shifting away/diversifying from.

Pretty much 2/3 of the articles on a last-7-days Google News search are Wall St. articles about how CSX is a recommended buy. That's been pretty consistent in those articles over the last year, so they're in very much solid shape with the market.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:Obviously they're going to have more slack space and cutbacks in the divisions much more heavily skewed to coal traffic. But that's also not offset so much by additional hires and power in regions where intermodal is taking off because that's where the company has made more recent investments in efficiency.

CSX's headcount was up 6% 1Q12 vs. 1Q11. Taking into account the employees furloughed the headcount is roughly flat and tracking volume.

CSX, with coal revenues down 5% 1Q12, continued its ~ 2-year meet/exceed operating ratio performance against NS, with coal revenues down 6% 1Q12, 71.1 vs. 73.3, respectively.