I want to re-emphasize what Gordon said. This review was about looking at the facts. We were supposed to break away from anecdotal evidence and shipper griping. When you see facts like 100% of the demand being met 49% of the time and 90% of car plans being met 12% to 28% of the time, you have to ask yourself if that is truly somebody who is competing for business.
I'll leave you with a quote from the former CEO and president of CN, who has largely been regarded as the one responsible for the new precision railroading model. This was in his book called How We Work and Why. It's an employee manual. He talks about the good old days of railroading here and says:
Their biggest operational constraints were geographic and climatic and in many cases customers were captive because the railroad was the only game in town. You either played by their rules, or you didn't play at all. Pricing of freight service was more a matter of extorting a cut of the customer's revenue than a negotiation of equals. Given the situation of low competition and high profitability, the railroads enjoyed the best of all worlds. Service was something the railroad provided more or less on its own terms.
When those conditions exist today, where the railroad's the only game in town and you either play by their rules or you don't, wouldn't you assume that the same outcomes would apply? That service would be provided “more or less on their own terms” and pricing of freight would be “more a matter of extorting a cut of the customer's revenue than a negotiation of equals”?