Following the Feb. 1 closure of the Howard Street tunnel in Baltimore and CSX’s subsequent collapse in operational efficiency through early April as it struggled with the associated reroutes, we’re now seeing a good initial fight back over the past three weeks through May 2.
These recoveries are always uneven, and last week the metric that decided to lag was network velocity, which retreated 0.2 mph (0.8%). However, beyond that there was more good news, including:
- A third big sequential drop in full system terminal dwell, which has gone from 24.7 to 21.8 hours over the past three weeks. In the chart below you can see CSX has now closed the YoY gap and dwell last week essentially matched the year-ago week. That’s not quite the victory it appears, because dwell last year was still two hours higher than the railroad’s post-recession best, which was set in 2019 (black line in the chart). Additionally, within these numbers the five hump yards are lagging, with average dwell of 29 hours still four hours above normal.
- Operating car inventory sequentially declined by another 2,650 to 134,000. The high was 139,054 in the second week of April, and normal is around 125,000, so there are about 9,000 to go. CSX has been taking chunks out of these car counts in recent weeks, but at some point it will get harder, and weekly gains will moderate.
- We also saw a nice drop in the number of cars that were slow-to-move (idle 48-plus hours) last week, from 5,093 to 3,615, which is a three-month low. In fact, the prior low was during the last week of January, just prior to the Howard Street tunnel closure on Feb. 1. If we divide these numbers by operating inventory, the proportion of slow-to-move fell from 3.7% to 2.7%. Put another way, the breadth of fluidity improved from 96.3% to 97.3%.
When CSX operationally inflected three weeks ago, we wrote that it may take until Labor Day before the network fully normalizes, or at least as much as it can, given the handicaps of the Howard Street and Blue Ridge subdivision reroutes. It has only been three weeks, but CSX is off to a faster start than we could have hoped, and ahead of that schedule. It’s good to see, and recovery efforts will be further aided by volume pressure temporarily backing off during the impending China effect on intermodal, Memorial Day week, and Fourth of July week.
