City of Montreal and CN focus on safety

Honourable Denis Coderre, Mayor of Montreal, joined Sean Finn, Executive Vice­-President, Corporate Services and Chief Legal Officer at CN, in announcing the areas of safety that the City of Montreal and CN will continue to focus on together.

Minnesota National Guard on the move, by rail

More than 1,300 pieces of military equipment from the Minnesota National Guard are being loaded onto railcars for movement from Camp Ripley through the weekend of May 21, 2016.

PTSI, CRSA team on physical characteristics training

PTSI Transportation and the Chicago Railroad Superintendents Association are offering a one-day conference, Railroad and Rail Transit Physical Characteristics Training and Testing – Are We Where We Need to Be?, in Chicago on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2016, in the Metra meeting room at 547 West Jackson Blvd., across from Chicago Union Station.

Ben Vient joins Railway Age as Managing Editor

Ben Vient has joined the editorial staff of Railway Age as Managing Editor, based at Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp. headquarters in New York City.

BNSF’s Fox plans retirement; Freeman named successor

Greg Fox, who has served as Executive Vice President, Operations at BNSF since November 2010, plans to retire. Dave Freeman will step into the position on June 1, 2016.

voestalpine Nortrak restructures management

voestalpine Nortrak Inc, headquartered in Richmond, BC, with seven manufacturing plants in the U.S., has announced that Ant Watson stepped down as CEO effective March 31, 2016.

Jason Seidl: Expect a pronounced level of caution

Near-term outlooks from Class I railroads at upcoming conferences “will contain a somewhat more pronounced level of caution given further softening in volumes since first-quarter 2016 earnings,” according to Cowen and Company Managing Director and Railway Age Wall Street Contributing Editor Jason Seidl. Following is an analysis released May 12, 2016:

Ottensmeyer succeeds Starling as KCS CEO

Patrick J. Ottensmeyer will succeed David L. Starling as Kansas City Southern CEO, effective July 1, 2016. Ottensmeyer will retain the title of President, a position he assumed on March 1, 2015.

Commentary

Hunter Harrison: Disrupting the status quo

National Transportation Policy mandates that railroads be managed efficiently. While railroad performance is reflective of improvement, some railroads excel, with the reasons increasingly under digital scrutiny by activist money managers entrusted with investments of foundations, endowments and pension funds seeking superior returns.

RBN Energy on CBR: “All is not gloom and doom”

A few years back, crude-by-rail (CBR) “emerged as the go-to fix that enabled pipeline-constrained shale regions to move fast-increasing volumes of oil to market,” writes RBN Energy LLC analyst Housley Carr in Slow Train Coming: What’s Next for CBR. “But changes in the market—lower oil prices, slowing/declining production, new pipeline capacity—have been challenging and undermining CBR.”

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