Insight
Creel: Mixing passenger and freight trains risks derailment due to curve physics
“You have to super elevate curves. So for a passenger train to go fast around a curve, which the curves are out in, in the geography you elevate the outer rail, and you drop down the inner rail, and it's sort of, you know, as inertia carries, carries you around…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Creel: Bill Ackman offered $200M when asked for $100M in unplanned capex
“I went into the board meeting, and I said, we have an issue. For me to optimize my service, I've got to run west out of Saskatoon, not east, but I need a hundred million dollars to spend on rail and ties and ballasts, and that was not planned for at all, and B…”
Opinion
Creel: The CP-KCS railroad merger is necessary for the free world
“So, so many things have happened since then that say, you know, not only is this a great merger, this is a necessary combination for the good of, maybe this is a bit ideological, for the good of mankind, for the good of the free world.”
Insight
Creel: Rail freight historically lost market share to trucks due to unreliability
“So that agility and flexibility, coupled with historically, railways have not always been the most reliable when it comes to a schedule, providing a What I call a truck-like reliable service. I think that has led to the demise of the freight that's hauled by r…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Creel: Autonomous trucks are inevitable despite major societal safety concerns
“Eventually it'd be inevitable. I think that there's obviously a big social hurdle. I know myself, I try to put myself, be a human all I can. Obviously when I'm out on the streets, if I were to see a, an AT-weller going by me, they make me nervous as they are. …”
Insight
Creel: The ideal rail siding design is 12,000 feet every 15 miles
“The perfect design, or at least in my 30 years of experience doing this, is having a 10 or 12,000 foot siding every 15 miles. That allows you the right spacing to be able to sequence trains, run long trains, make train meets, and still be efficient.”
Assertion Supported
Creel: Precision Scheduled Railroading cut CP's active locomotives by one-third
“At CP, when we implemented Precision Scheduled Railroad back in 2012, 2013 we were running with 1500 locomotives in service a day. Today we're moving more freight With about two-thirds of that, so a thousand to 1100.”
Insight
Creel: Building infrastructure for peak demand destroys long-term business viability
“He said you can't build a church for Easter Sunday. If you do, you go out of business the other 51 weeks out of the year, because you can't You can't pay to sustain it, so you can over, I guess, over-engineer something spend more money than is necessary, and t…”
Insight
Creel: Overselling network capacity destroys customer trust and business models
“If I allow my Aspirations or eagerness to grow revenue to exceed my ability to be able to produce a product. I don't, I not only destroy trust with that particular customer, I destroy my business model.”
Insight
Creel: Asset utilization teams must maintain tension with marketing, not harmony
“So this one particular group, I call them they maintain the tension in an organization. They're not about harmony. They're about doing the right thing. So they have to assess the marketing opportunities, and in turn, they sign off on, we have the capacity, whe…”
Insight
Creel: Profit margin is an outcome of asset velocity, not the target
“Because we're turning assets that naturally controls your cost. That produces a good margin. It's an outcome. It's not the focus, and at the same time, it's a great service, because again, it's scheduled.”
Assertion Partly supported
Creel: Locomotives Cost $2M-$3M Each and Require 2-3 Mechanics to Maintain
“500 additional locomotives, well, just in capital expense alone, they cost two to three million dollars apiece, and then you've got to have two or three mechanics per locomotive to maintain them, you've got to have repair parts”
Disclosure
Creel: CP rejected new freight business to protect existing customer commitments
“You know, we just recently went through a contract negotiation with a customer that because their current service provider is not providing them an ability to grow in their markets and satisfy their existing customers' needs, they came to us with a big opportu…”
Assertion Supported
Creel: Winter air brake limitations prevent running full-length freight trains
“You just can't run trains as long and as large as you, in the winter time as you can in the summertime because of mechanical limitations. Air going through a train, train line, you just physically can't do it.”
Insight
Creel: Leaving rail cars behind causes compounding weekly network inefficiencies
“Well, if on Tuesday, I miss 10 cars, well, on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, that pressure builds up, and I have more trains than I have capacity, more demand cars than I have trains to move it on. Going back to what I said, one train a day, It's all defined on …”
