CSX Corporation

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CSX locomotives in their signature yellow and blue.

© Jiawangkun/Dreamstime.com

CSX Corporation is a major U.S. freight transportation company based in Jacksonville, Florida. Its main operating subsidiary, CSX Transportation, runs approximately 20,000 route miles of track across 26 states, the District of Columbia, and Ontario and Quebec in Canada. CSX is one of six surviving Class I railroads in North America—those with annual operating revenue well above the regulatory threshold—and is a key mover of intermodal containers, coal, agricultural products, and industrial freight through major East Coast hubs and inland corridors.

CSX Corporation was established in 1980 through the merger of the Chessie System, Inc., and Seaboard Coast Line Industries, Inc. Although operations remained separate at first, the two companies were formally consolidated in 1986 under the CSX Transportation name.

The Chessie System was created as a holding company for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company, which had gained control of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company and the Western Maryland Railway Company in 1960 and 1967, respectively. Its routes extended from the Great Lakes to Chesapeake Bay and the Ohio Valley, with lines to Philadelphia and St. Louis.

The Seaboard system traced its lineage to the Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line, which had merged in the 1960s to form the Seaboard Coast Line and, later, the Seaboard System Railroad. The Seaboard System operated lines from the Gulf of Mexico to Chesapeake Bay and the Ohio Valley, with others extending to Chicago and St. Louis.

In the late 1990s, CSX and Norfolk Southern jointly acquired Conrail, the federally created freight carrier that had dominated the Northeast and parts of the Midwest since the 1970s. The deal, finalized in 1999, split most of Conrail’s assets between the two companies: CSX received 42%, while Norfolk Southern took the remaining 58%.

The acquisition gave CSX access to key Northeastern markets, including lines into New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, as well as expanded Midwest connections. To preserve competition in densely populated regions, portions of Conrail’s network—primarily in northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Detroit—remained under the operation of Conrail Shared Assets, a rail terminal and switching company jointly owned by CSX and Norfolk Southern.

After the Conrail acquisition, the company spent the next decade modernizing its networks and streamlining operations after a wave of consolidation in the later 20th century. Its most dramatic transformation, however, would be in 2017, with the arrival of veteran rail executive E. Hunter Harrison. Recruited by activist investor company Mantle Ridge, which had recently taken a stake in CSX, Harrison was brought in to implement his precision scheduled railroading (PSR) model, which aimed to tighten operations and reduce terminal dwell time—the amount of time a railcar spends at a terminal or rail yard between arrival and departure, and a key metric in railroad efficiency.

Harrison’s tenure was short. He died later that year, and CSX’s board named James Foote, a former Canadian National Railway executive and close associate of Harrison, as his successor. Under Foote, CSX continued to implement PSR principles while addressing concerns about service reliability and labor reductions. Foote also coordinated the 2022 acquisition of Pan Am Railways, which expanded CSX’s network into northern New England, thus extending its reach into the last major region of the eastern U.S. not already served by its network.