Union Pacific Corporation earnings call

… hit the most important three items when you look back in time and then think about how we already are planning to do it differently. So one of the things that certainly caused challenges in the past was technology when you had two railroads merging together with two different transportation systems. It wasn't the technology itself that caused the problem. It was the pace at which the integration occurred. In other words, there wasn't intentional thought and change management around what is the pace you cut that over. Well, we've got a huge advantage. We, Union Pacific, have already demonstrated a very strong ability to change over systems, including our full transportation system called NetControl just a little less than two years ago very successfully, not a blip. No customer was impacted. It was seamless. It was very effective. So we've got that experience. In addition, when you move past the technology and you think about timing, you've seen in the past with some mergers where a KPI right out of the gate is the pace of implementation. Now, look, we're not in the business of going slow. We're in the business of understanding exactly what we have to do on day one, day 90, day 180. And I'll tell you, on day one, you're not going to see a lot of difference, right? We will operate these two railroads largely independently, at least for the first few months, and then we'll thoughtfully, because of all the planning that we're doing, implement one action. Once that action is implemented, we'll make sure that it worked effectively, and then we'll move to the next. And then I saved the most important one for last. If you look at past mergers, often the premium railroad was buying a railroad that was operating very poorly. That's not the case here. The Norfolk Southern is a good railroad. They're good in how they think about their infrastructure. They're good in how they think about technology. Together we're going to be even stronger, but we're not buying some railroad that's been in disarray for a decade. We're buying a really good railroad, combining it with another really good railroad, And obviously, as Jim's pointed out today, then that outcome is a positive for all of our stakeholders. So that work is all underway. It's being done very intentionally. And we're going to be the most comprehensive integration of any two railroads that this country's ever seen.