President's Comments
Hello, I am pleased to have this opportunity to communicate to you, customer, employee and friend, for the first time as President of Guilford Rail System. Under Dave Fink’s leadership we have inherited an excellent physical plant, a Harriman Award safety winner for the last three years and a dedicated work force poised for the new opportunities presented in the post-Conrail era. I would like to thank Mr. Fink for the opportunity and challenge that he has given our team to lead Guilford Rail System into the new millenium. It is our goal to significantly increase our market share and grow a larger bottom line. This is no small task, and involves the complete focus of all our people. We are eager to reacquaint you with our dreams, our priorities and our plans as we anticipate a new era of railroading in the Northeast.
As you know, the economy is strong, at least for now, and that is providing a substantial opportunity for rail freight movement. The Conrail system will be split up between CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern, two railroad giants, in just a few months, and there will be significant competition for the traffic which moves over Guilford’s lines. There have been many changes within the management, affording our people to stretch their capabilities and initiate new ideas. I am excited at the prospects which are appearing on the horizon and consider it a great privilege to join with my colleague, Executive Vice President David Fink, in leading a fine team of professional railroaders in serving our customers efficiently, economically and safely.
There are some priorities which I wish to place before you as readers, regardless of your relationship to Guilford, for these will impact you in some way at some time no matter if you are customer, employee or just an interested friend. The first priority, one established by Mr. Fink from the very beginning, is SAFETY, specifically, the safety of our employees. We consider our people to be our most necessary, most valuable, most important resource, the means by which the company will succeed or falter. Any accident, whether it be personal injury or damage to property, carries with it a significant cost, be it financial, operational or social. The loss of an employee to a personal injury is detrimental to the person involved, his family and the company.
I will have a lot more to say about SAFETY in the months ahead, but I wish to state here that nothing is of greater importance to each employee and to their employer than his or her safety on the job. Everything the employee does at work must be evaluated with their well-being first in mind, and nobody bears more responsibility than the employee. Further, the employee bears responsibility for the impact of his or her actions on other people within their work zone. Of course, many of our trains operate on private tracks while switching our customers. We have, in my view, an excellent and cooperative relationship with each of our customers, and we draw on those relationships as we request you as customers to keep those areas where the employees will be working in safe and suitable condition. We trust that you will fully understand our position if we should request you to deal with an unsafe situation.
Our next priority is CUSTOMER FOCUS, or, put another way, our reason for existence, which is to provide the kind of transportation service our customer wants and is willing to pay for. There is much competition out there in this day of deregulation. If we are going to attract and hold customers, we must provide better service than anyone else, and I want us to provide the best. You will read in the following pages about some of the things we are doing to come up with the “best” and you will hear more as we continue on. We intend to be better prepared than ever before to enter the Winter months, and we hope that all of you will appreciate the results of our campaign. You will hear more later.
The last priority I will mention now is TEAM MANAGEMENT. It is all too easy to assume that the business of railroading is automatically conducted by a team. Actually, the railroad consists of a group of small businesses, each with discrete functions which contribute to and are necessary for the achievement of the main objective of providing the customer with the desired service. Since these individual businesses compete for the same resources, in many respects, yet operate independently, the overall goals may become obscured in the press of operations. It is our intention to develop stronger relationships between the departments, to promote greater understanding of the “other guy” and his responsibilities, and to maintain our focus on the goals.
As we approach our New England winter, with longer nights and frozen surfaces, may I encourage each of you to review your habits of walking, driving and working and refresh your minds as to what is safe and what is dangerous. We want to take full advantage of the opportunities which lie ahead, and to do that properly, we must perform safely and remain focused at all times. While I may sound a bit like a football coach, I assure you that it is my conviction that to do our job of being the best, we must first be best at the basics.
Tom Steiniger