FROM THE EDITOR, RAILWAY AGE JANUARY 2026 ISSUE: Years ago, then-BNSF chief executive Matt Rose said that railroads will need to adapt to the “Amazon Economy,” to be successful in a supply chain where customers expect to know, in real time, their shipment status, from origin to destination. Last month, talking with Railroader of the Year John Orr at Norfolk Southern’s Inman Yard—a key intermodal hub—I couldn’t help but notice bright blue Amazon-badged double-stack containers and trailers moving through the yard on an intermodal train. Now, I may sound out of touch, but I’d never seen them moving by rail.
UPS containers and trailers? Of course. J.B. Hunt, Schneider? Ditto. But Amazon? Can railroads meet the exacting supply chain requirements that consumer-based companies like Amazon demand?
Apparently so.
“The movement of those containers is going to affect how the consumer, the end user, gets their delivery to their doorstep,” I said to John. “So being part of the Amazon supply chain puts a lot of pressure on being able to move that container and those products when the end user is expecting them.”
“Railways have always been on a cutting edge,” John said. “Even if you go back to Abraham Lincoln, railways, the technology of the time and the information corridor— newspapers, telegraphs, all of that—revolved around the rail network.
“As the world drove change, railways participated in every economy, and we’re now participating in the new economy as well. If you want to characterize it this time, it’s proof that you can’t stand still. It’s proof that as you invest in people and developing their capability, their knowledge of what competition looks like, what relevance feels and looks like, needs to apply not only to themselves, but to customers or to a broader ecosystem of stakeholders.
“You can appreciate why PSR 2.0 is so well received here at Norfolk Southern. We’re one of the largest movers of intermodal freight. We’re one of the largest movers of automobiles and automobile components. And all of that has a timeliness that has never been felt more acutely.
“So we’re ready for it. It’s an evolution. You have to do it intentionally and build those capabilities intentionally. And that’s what we’re doing at Norfolk Southern. And I love the fact that we have 19,000 people across our network who are getting the opportunity to make supply chains more robust, more reliable and faster in the United States of America.
“PSR 2.0 is at the center of our transformation that is allowing our business to grow, including all stakeholders. All participants have an active role in the evolution of Norfolk Southern, which has as much meaning at headqurters in Atlanta as it does in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or Buffalo, New York. It’s the ability to participate in a continuous engagement chart, the ability for people to be included at the table across departments and across the stratification of leadership here.”
For more on this remarkable leader, see our 2026 Railroader of the Year story and video.
