RAILWAY AGE JANUARY 2026 ISSUE: “Intentional leadership” motivates this fourth-generation railroader.
Railway Age’s 2026 Railroader of the Year, Norfolk Southern Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer John Orr, is an accomplished fourth-generation railroader who began his career as a craft railroader and union leader, bringing decades of hands-on experience to his leadership. He has held a range of operational and management roles throughout his career and is known across the industry as a proven transformation leader with a strong track record of implementing scheduled railroading to achieve safety and service excellence.
Since being appointed EVP and COO in 2024, Orr has led railway operations—including safety, transportation, network planning, engineering, and mechanical—with a clear focus on performance, accountability and culture. His positive impact can be seen in multiple key performance metrics. These include the lowest FRA Personal Injury ratio at NS in a decade; a double-digit improvement in FRA Reportable Train Accidents; leading the rail industry in FRA Main Line Train Accident rates for 2024; and improved car-miles per day, decreased dwell, and increased velocity across the network. Orr’s “PSR 2.0” approach has driven rapid and sustainable improvements in service reliability and operating efficiency. He is committed to building long-term leadership capability across the organization, championing the launch of the Thoroughbred Academy, which is helping embed a culture of safety, service and operational excellence across all levels of the railroad. By investing in people and process, he is developing the next generation of railroaders, benefitting employees, customers and rail-served communities.
“John Orr is a true railroader,” notes industry veteran and Norfolk Southern board member Gil Lamphere. “But he was dumped into a dark cultural hole. The ops team was not his own and had churned through several heads. His CEO was a marketing person who strongly prioritized marketing and sales over operating essentials. His CEO’s predecessors weren’t rail operators. Understandably, after years of financial success, his board hadn’t spent a lot of time on operating fundamentals. But it was even worse. John was under Wall Street’s microscope and expected to run the 100 yard dash, pole vault, hammer throw, run the 5,000 meter and lead the football team to the Sugar Bowl—all at the same time.”
In Atlanta, site of Norfolk Southern headquarters as well as Inman Yard, a principal intermodal hub, John Orr and I talked about his long career and the transformational work he’s doing.
RAILWAY AGE: You come from a railroading family. You’re a fourth-generation railroader going back to your great grandfather, mostly in Canada, at Canadian National. Other family members are railroaders, like your brothers.
JOHN ORR: I’m so proud to be here and so honored for this recognition. And it’s a testament to many people before me—my family, my history, all the people at Norfolk Southern and for that matter, all the people in the sector that I’ve had the privilege to work with over the course of my career. I had the advantage of a dad who could impart that on my brothers, my cousins and me over the course of our lives. Our family has been a part of the railroading framework for more than 400 years of service. I’m proud of my family’s roots
in railroading.
RAILWAY AGE: You started your career as a brakeman on Canadian National, spending 35 years there. And you and your brothers are the first ones to enter the management ranks. Your great grandfather, grandfather, and father spent their careers in the field as union employees. You were also a union leader at some point.
JOHN ORR: I was a brakeman in the early days of my career and advanced through the transportation department and eventually drove trains and managed yard terminals as a yardmaster. I was a local chairman for the United Transportation Union. Those were foundational experiences I’ve been able to tap into through the course of my career. My brothers Pat and Tim and I are first generation in our family to be managers. All the experiences, good or bad, have shaped me in how I see the railroad, how I can engage, and my commitment to intentional leadership at Norfolk Southern.
RAILWAY AGE: Intentional leadership. How do you define it?
JOHN ORR: It’s purpose- and value-driven. I draw from my experiences the work that needs to be done and understand it. One of the things that I took away from my early career is the respect for how tough this business is, and how tough you need to be in the rail business, whether it’s a cold day in northern Canada or a stormy day on the U.S. Gulf Coast. You have to withstand a lot, and you must respect both the operation and the environment you’re working in. Intentionality takes the purpose of what we do and how we’re driving business performance and business outcomes and puts a plan around it. It gives people the opportunity to be successful. It creates the skill that need to be aligned and then creates accountability and visibility across the entire business scheme. To be intentional is to understand what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and give people the space to be successful.
RAILWAY AGE: You’re Canadian, of course. But you recently became a U.S. citizen.
JOHN ORR: My family is from northern Ontario, where there are small railroad towns. My formative years were in the southern Ontario area, and most recently, for the past decade, I’ve called Chicago home. I like to say I’ve traveled across Canada and the United States as a citizen of the railway, ended up in the U.S., and made a commitment to this country and citizenship. I have the privilege of being both a Canadian and U.S. citizen.
RAILWAY AGE: You and I have spent time in the field together, most recently on the executive train, during one of your regular tours to engage with the employees. You love being in the field. You’re in your element out in the field. You love it. The employees get that. They feel your energy, your passion.
JOHN ORR: If you’re going to do something, do it well. And in our business, to do it well, you must show up. I want to show up. So, it makes it even easier. And I think that authenticity allows me to connect. I believe this allows a speak-up culture that allows people to talk about what’s on their mind. You don’t necessarily get a veneer of what’s happening. You really get into the richness of the situations and helps me give answers faster, and it helps get awareness quicker. In that way, I can build the environment for people to have confidence and capabilities aligned. I spent a lot of time in the field. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I also have an obligation on the other side of it, within 650, Norfolk Southern headquarters. I love that there are great people in the field and in the network environment. Tapping into both and being that bridge to bringing people from the field into the network center or from the center into the field is success.
RAILWAY AGE: l sense that people are comfortable with you, regardless of whether it’s in the field or in the office. They feel they can speak their minds. I don’t think everybody possesses those qualities. That obviously works for you.
JOHN ORR: Thank you! Speaking up is the most important thing you can ask a person to do. People rely on me and my team to make good decisions on policy, on practices, so that it supports their abilities in the field. People’s lives depend on it. If you close that off, you’re not serving the entirety of the organization the way you should. But I have very high standards. I’m not an easy person to get along with in a lot of respects. But I think you can have high standards and a high degree of respect for people. It starts with how you create the ability to have tough conversations and deal with tough issues in a respectful way and applaud people for bringing those issues to you, no matter how difficult they may be to overcome. We have a saying here: Deeds matter. Judge me on the speed at which I engage on an issue builds trust, which creates the ability for people to take the right risks and to really drive outside of their comfort zone, to get stronger and get better. And that’s a big part of our transformation. That whole ecosystem of engagement starts with showing up and creating that bond.
RAILWAY AGE: Precision Scheduled Railroading 2.0. Many people in our industry don’t quite understand it yet. What is PSR 2.0? There’s a perception that PSR is only about operations, cost control, longer trains. But at its core, it really isn’t. PSR 2.0 is the next step?
JOHN ORR: We’ve talked about this and you recognized right away it was different back in 2019. It was very clear to me it was an evolution of what started the rail renaissance in the early 2000s in Canada. PSR in the simplest form is aligning resources to workload and making sure that your variable and fixed costs have the right balance against what you’re trying to accomplish moving freight and constraining those resources so that they can be optimized. PSR 2.0 is the next step. It is taking that same discipline on managing resources and your fixed and variable costs against your workload. But now it’s intentionally engaging other groups that can have a say in how you can optimize. Bringing stakeholders to the table both upstream and downstream, so that you can get to solutions faster and more broadly to help growth. PSR, left on its own, would be about managing finite productivity. Eventually you run out of runway. PSR 2.0 takes it beyond that and creates wins across an array of stakeholders, whether it’s a safety or commercial regulator, government, customers, labor groups—all of that coming together to create comprehensive solutions for business and business acumen and eventually growth. It looks beyond the immediate and takes an ecosystem approach intentionally to build that capability. It starts to build trust with the people entrusting you with their goods to get delivered as quickly and safely as possible. People who are trusting us to run through their communities safely. For the workforce to understand that as we learn and find better ways to do things, include it in the conversations, the training and the outputs. When you bring it all together, you can call it several things, but I coined the phrase PSR 2.0, which to me means the evolution of what was working in the first place, but that’s got a lot more business relevance today. There’s a lot of runway.
RAILWAY AGE: Working in Canada and the United States and in Mexico and even overseas, you have engaged with governmental leadership at various levels. They are as big a stakeholder. And you’ve also had responsibility for passenger services, with VIA Rail and Amtrak. From the freight rail standpoint, that could be a sensitive subject.
JOHN ORR: They’re all essential stakeholders within the ecosystem of railroading. Mexico was a key piece to grow more effectively. There were certain things the government had to do, and we needed to do as a rail company. Together we could energize the economic investments that were being contemplated. The timing was all around nearshoring and reshoring. Conversations about how we were bringing U.S. standards and regulations into the application of the of rules and policies in Mexico meant that international investors could rely on heavy-haul solutions and have relative certainty, helping the lawmakers in any country understand what’s needed. I’ll paraphrase an inscription on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington: “It’s up to industry to lead the evolution of industry. It’s up to industry to lead transformation in America, and for the government to support it.” It struck home that engaging with government officials and helping them stay informed with what our businesses are doing and where the business is evolving, will help them make better decisions, whether it’s a regulatory framework or a budgetary investment, or even just understanding what’s going on to support the economy of whatever country we’re in, whether it’s Canada, the United States or Mexico. And what was really, really interesting is one night, I was in our business cars with the Canadian ambassador, with business leaders from Canada, the United States, talking about the importance of those engagements and creating seamless capability between Canada and Mexico, and how important that was to all three economies and people within the economies. Those engagements can’t be overlooked. Now, we have professionals who do that very well. But when an operating person can have that discussion from time to time with lawmakers, it really allows them to understand what’s going on, how things are moving, and how things can move better when we work together.
RAILWAY AGE: Railroading is a complicated business. A tough business. And to try to get people who don’t work for the railroad or a supplier or a consultant or are in some way connected to the industry to help them understand what it is we do is a heavy lift. It requires a lot of persistence.
JOHN ORR: I stay in the sector because I believe in the space. I believe in the sector. I really believe that railroading is critical to the economies of our countries. I really believe that to maintain that relevance, we always have to be driving and changing and performing. And it is a non-linear, very complex ecosystem we are part of. And as we educate and invest in those relationships, we get better and stronger ourselves. We understand what we need to do to support a broader landscape of laws and regulations and connect faster upstream and downstream with the supply chains coming into the country, where the competitive threats may be, or the competitive advantages that we have to leverage. Helping whoever the stakeholder is to be a part of that starts to lend itself to a better solution, faster and more accurately. When you can do that, you’ve got good use of your capital, whether it’s dollars in your ROIC or political capital. We’ve got community people running the railway every single day, every hour. I’m proud to be a part of this team in the context of where we are today. We’ve transformed this company over the past two years. We’ve focused on safety and have delivered. We’ve focused on service, and our customers are feeling it. We’ve put a lot of effort, not just in operations, but across the entire company to be relevant and very purposeful on how we have evolved, the company and our financial contributions, our market value and the overall value that we bring, especially in this part of the country.
RAILWAY AGE: We spent the morning in the field at Inman Yard, and we talked about how you engage with people in the field and your background. At headquarters in Atlanta, I had an opportunity to see one of your war rooms. It was the mechanical war room and the technology being developed for safety purposes. Then I saw an application of that war room technology in the Network Operations Center where mechanical defects are identified, flagged and taken care of. There are several of these war rooms.
JOHN ORR: I believe safety is the foundation for everything we do, the value through which every decision must be made. The beauty of the war rooms is that they bring that principle to life. Our war rooms were born from a desire to have continuous improvement. The highest standard and highest capability is safety. And from that come reliability and service, all the guiding principles we need to drive our business. The war rooms are pretty cool because they’re not only protecting the infrastructure and protecting the service at Norfolk Southern, but they’re also leading our cutting edge of technological investment and the marriage between technology and skills and people. The war rooms were started to make sure that we had every opportunity to take a train from one point to another point in the network, per plan, not interrupted by unintended, unscheduled stops along the way. As we develop more insights into the reasons why trains were stopping, we’re handling them properly. We are engaging when we have disruption. But getting to the root cause and the desire for continuous improvement, was what really drove the war rooms. I’m proud to say we’ve invested in technology. We applied the insights that we’ve gleaned from the technology, like our portals, and have taught our employees differently. We’ve invested in the field to engineer out problems, and in some cases, we had to change our policies, to make ourselves safer and more reliable. The war rooms are one example of that. I believe that if you create the environment, give people the opportunity and measure vigorously on continuous improvement, you’re going to find that next level of capability. Our people are benefiting in all layers of the company—craft employees, management, senior executives, all working arm in arm to really understand how to improve safety and performance at Norfolk Southern. It’s about the principle of common purpose, extreme clarity. Our mission is very clear: Improve safety, improve capability. The support, the energy of the war rooms bring, in the headquarters environment and in the field, is really felt. People are responsive to that. The connotation here at Norfolk Southern is that a continuous improvement environment is separating us from the competition. It’s really a positive driver of our current state of transformation.
RAILWAY AGE: A lot of the work developing the technology, the algorithms, everything that goes into that, is done in-house. So in a way, you have better control over that.
JOHN ORR: We’re at a point where we can do things better, faster and more effectively. There are cases where we use off-the-shelf technology from our suppliers, especially when it comes to technology. But by being self-directed, aligning all of our resources appropriately and being as responsive as possible to emerging conditions, that self-determination really pays dividends. Let me just share something: Around this time last year, I happened to be in Chicago. We had a derailment just outside of Chicago. The train had been on Norfolk Southern for one mile. It had come hundreds of miles to us, and we had a derailment that I was responsible for—that’s the rules of the network. I challenged my team to find a better way to insulate Norfolk Southern from such a short-haul significant issue, and they got to work. Within seven months, we had a wheel integrity system built and deployed. And just this week, while actively scouring the network at Burns Harbor, it found a broken wheel—the same situation I had to deal with last year. In less than a year, we were able to design, engineer, test and deploy the technology that’s now protecting the network, and we’re able to go to scale at a much faster rate because it’s an economic solution as much as it is a safety solution.
RAILWAY AGE: A defect like a broken wheel, for example, can result in a catastrophic derailment.
JOHN ORR: Yes, and this is one example of how we’re bringing technology to complement our skills, capabilities and safety management systems. Obviously, we’re in an era of technological advancement at a pace an unseen before, so we must take a very holistic view of what we want to accomplish from the investments we’re making in technology, linking them to a business need. That common purpose and
extreme clarity provide our people the environment, opportunity and skills to be successful. When you do that intentionally, it aligns with our business purpose and our business mission. And that clarity helps people rally around things like the war room or other investments that help them do their job more reliably every day.
RAILWAY AGE: You’ve often said that people are at the center of every investment Norfolk Southern makes. You do a lot investing in training and mentoring, like the Thoroughbred Academy.
JOHN ORR: I’ve always believed that people will make the difference in any business and especially in the rail business. Perhaps that comes from my experience across all the jobs I’ve done in the rail space. But I have a great appreciation for enhancing people’s capabilities, giving the opportunity for them to invest their time in efforts to making the rail sector stronger and more effective. Our people are truly at the center of our transformation here at Norfolk Southern. We’ve invested in safety camps and safety training. And it’s not only a leader-led engagement. It has become broader, taking on a life of its own and becoming transformational. Our managers are able to make better, faster decisions in the field, particularly around the value of safety, and then transitioning through to the business acumen they need to keep us competitive. The Thoroughbred Academy was the first intentional investment in our transformation. As 2026 evolves, we’ll expand that to business acumen and capability. And as we advance through the curriculum of the Thoroughbred Academy over the next three and four years, our employees will benefit from that investment to help them not only deal with the issues and challenges of today, but even on the growing landscape of what competition looks like in two years or three years, so that we’re always pro-competitive, where we’re able to fight for business, and create and articulate a safe platform for people to want to be an employee, a part of the Norfolk Southern family.
RAILWAY AGE: This is my first time in the relatively new headquarters in Atlanta. In my career, which is going on 34 years, I’ve been in a lot of Class I corporate headquarters. The employee diversity here really stands out, as well as the technology.
JOHN ORR: We value contributions across the board. I’ve always believed that if you give people the opportunity, they’ll shine. When you do that, you can attract new talent. And you can attract new skills from experienced talent. And that’s what we’re doing here. We’re creating a system where people are really valued for their contributions. And when you attract talent from the outside and from within, you have a nice balance of experience, curiosity and confidence. That’s what we’re incubating here. Some of the things like you have seen, in the Network Operations Center or a war room, were almost like a think tank. I really believe that when you create a speak-up environment, people know that what they’ve got to say matters, and that they could be wrong is okay. It helps us get to good solutions quickly. That’s the environment you see amplified across this entire campus here at 650. People are motivated, people are engaged. And without that, our transformation wouldn’t be possible. And when you can ignite 19,000 thinkers and doers and engage, you’re creating this upward mobility of capability like you’ve never seen. And that’s one of the reasons why our transformation has been defined by service, safety, financial acumen. All of that in the past 20 months or so have been the body of work of 19,000 people. What you see here in Atlanta is just a slice of what’s going on across our entire network. It’s empowering.
RAILWAY AGE: Which brings us to the reason why the railroad exists—and that’s to serve the customer, move freight from point A to point B. Now, I’m sure you’re familiar with the old expression, I don’t know who said it or how long ago it was, but it was eons ago: “We could run a damn good railroad if it weren’t for the damn customers.” That’s not the case anymore. How have your customers reacted to what everybody is doing here and the transformation?
JOHN ORR: We value our customers. And if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have the lights on here. In fact, we want more, and that’s what we’re doing. Let me just take you back a bit in PSR 1.0. It was really about making sure the resources were aligned to the volume, and the cost structure was more balanced and reliable. In that way, the offering could be aligned to what a customer is expecting in 2.0. The customer must drive what good service looks like, and we’re competing on a different scale right now. Things that existed or didn’t exist in the early 2000s. Things we’re dealing with now, customer expectations, weren’t even thought of in the early 2000s, like same day delivery of a parcel to your door. This has set a benchmark on customer service. Yes, rail is heavy haul, bigger boxes of products. But we still have to take a different view. And when you can align an effort to continuously improve service, it creates a reliability standard a customer can measure and have visibility and influence over. That allows us then to improve our overall customer needs and deliverables. I’ve gone from the philosophy of moving a train within a prescribed time to moving a car in a prescribed time, especially with our rich network of intermodal and other kind of merchandise products. I really look at it from a product view. How do I get that product from its source to
its destination?
RAILWAY AGE: So you drill right down to the product?
JOHN ORR: Yes, in a lot of cases. We understand our customers’ downstream needs. We work hard to create a reliable supply chain, to participate actively in that overall end-to end-solution for that product.
John Orr will be presented with the Railroader of the Year Award at the traditional dinner hosted by the Western Railway Club at the Union League Club of Chicago on March 10, 2026. He’s also a featured speaker at Railway Age’s Next-Generation Freight Rail Conference, held the same day in the same location.
Watch the video of this interview
