CEO PERSPECTIVE: Safety Is a Journey, Not a Destination

Written by Keith Creel, President and CEO, Canadian Pacific Kansas City

Keith Creel, President and CEO, Canadian Pacific Kansas City

As part of a special series in Railway Age’s April 2023 issue, 13 chief executives of leading North American companies answer the single-most critical question: What is the biggest challenge facing the North American rail industry? Keith Creel of CPKC is the ninth to share his perspective.

Editor’s Note: This essay was written just prior to the official combination of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern to form Canadian Pacific Kansas City on April 14.

As an industry, we must prepare ourselves to grow as supply chain patterns around the world change. That means anticipating those changes and adapting to meet them. We must earn the confidence of our customers with our service and, just as important, keep safety at the forefront of everything we do to protect our employees, our goods and our communities.

Following the March 15 Surface Transportation Board decision approving our transaction, the Canadian Pacific (CP) team is focused on executing its combination with Kansas City Southern (KCS) to become Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC). We’ve spent more than two years pursuing this once-in-a-lifetime, end-to-end combination in order to better serve the North American supply chain. The combined CPKC will bring increased competition and expanded service options at a time when they have never been needed more.

The pandemic-induced manufacturing shutdowns in China, and the shipping interruptions that followed, led companies to reconsider where to locate manufacturing. Our industry must consider whether containers from Asia bound for inland points will continue in the same pattern as they have in recent decades. These shipments will of course remain a valuable part of our business, but the trend toward nearshoring means we must be ready to grow in new ways to serve our customers’ changing needs.

Our new CPKC single-line network is uniquely positioned to move goods among Mexico, the United States and Canada. Shippers see the long truck queues at the major border crossings. They want new options to compete with trucks and highways. These options need to come with lower greenhouse gas emissions and cannot sacrifice reliability or transit times. The new CPKC single-line haul to the U.S. Midwest and beyond does just that. We estimate businesses will redirect 64,000 trucks annually from highways to our rail network. We will win that business by offering truck-like transit times and reliability while capitalizing on rail’s environmental and fuel economy benefits.

At the same time, we as an industry have seen communities turn skeptical about the safety of trains traveling through their borders. We know our industry represents the safest method of transporting goods over land, and we must tell that story. We must also embrace safety as a journey, not a destination, as we work toward being safer today than we were yesterday.

In 2022, CP set the all-time record for the lowest Federal Railroad Administration accident frequency rate. We are now 69% lower than the Class I average and have maintained the lowest accident rate for 17 consecutive years. CP’s culture of safety, supported by its history of sustained investments in core infrastructure and technology, aligns with that of KCS, allowing the combined system to operate at the apex of rail safety. CPKC will implement the combination with safety at the forefront of everything it does.

Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), which CP implemented a decade ago, has been integral to that best-in-class safety record. We set a new all-time low train accident frequency of 0.93 in 2022—more than a 50% improvement since we implemented PSR.

I have always said that PSR is a model that works in any demand environment. We right-size our assets for the business, whether that’s a booming economy or a downturn, and continuously adapt our network to shifting demand. Now we have an opportunity to reshape our network to meet the needs of this moment. I could not be more proud of the hard-working CP and KCS railroaders who helped to make our historic combination happen, and I look forward to achieving great things together as we offer new services to our customers.