A record number of industrial development projects — largely in the Southeast but also scattered around the CSX network — should produce annual merchandise volume growth of 1% to 2% above the rate of industrial production, executives said during the railroad’s investor day on Thursday.
“We’re seeing a sea change,” Chief Commercial Officer Kevin Boone says. “If you think about the last decades, we’ve seen industry leaving our network every year and having to overcome that headwind. What we see over the next three years and beyond is that will now become a tailwind with industry coming back to the U.S. And it’s a huge factor in our growth outlook.”
The projects in CSX’s industrial development pipeline could add between 150,000 and 300,000 carloads annually by 2027, says Christina Bottomley, the railroad’s vice president of business development and real estate.
The lion’s share of the projects — roughly 95% — involve merchandise business worth $1.2 billion in revenue from 2025 through 2027. The balance is intermodal or automotive traffic.
Aside from new traffic from specific development projects, CSX expects rising demand in several merchandise categories. Among them: Cement and aggregates business; waste traffic in the Northeast; transloads of chemicals, forest products, and agricultural shipments, plus gains in soybean traffic due to booming production of renewable fuels.