{"id":10927,"date":"2026-06-04T18:58:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T22:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thelogisticsoflogistics.com\/?p=10927"},"modified":"2026-06-04T18:58:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T22:58:43","slug":"short-lines-big-impact-how-short-line-railroads-power-americas-supply-chain-with-joey-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelogisticsoflogistics.com\/short-lines-big-impact-how-short-line-railroads-power-americas-supply-chain-with-joey-evans\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Lines, Big Impact: How Short Line Railroads Power America\u2019s Supply Chain with Joey Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-1 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1144px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-0 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:0px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:0px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><div class=\"fusion-text fusion-text-1\"><p><span data-teams=\"true\">In \u201cShort Lines, Big Impact: How Short Line Railroads Power America\u2019s Supply Chain\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/josephlynchjr\/\"><span class=\"s1\">Joe Lynch<\/span><\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/joey-e-8262373b3\/\">Joey Evans<\/a>, Senior Director, Government Affairs &amp; Business Development, TNW Corporation, discuss how Class III short line railroads leverage technology, sustainability, and first-and-last-mile service to keep American commerce moving.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"border-image: initial; border: medium none currentcolor;\" title=\"Embed Player\" src=\"https:\/\/play.libsyn.com\/embed\/episode\/id\/41542545\/height\/192\/theme\/modern\/size\/large\/thumbnail\/yes\/custom-color\/4c4ca4\/time-start\/00:00:00\/playlist-height\/200\/direction\/backward\/download\/yes\/font-color\/FFFFFF\" width=\"100%\" height=\"192\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2><strong>About Joey Evans<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/joey-e-8262373b3\/\">Joey Evans<\/a> is the Senior Director, Government Affairs &amp; Business Development, TNW Corporation. He is a seasoned rail industry professional with over 20 years of experience, leading TNW&#8217;s development and execution of government affairs and strategic growth initiatives. His role oversees legislative strategy, public funding efforts, real estate and industrial development projects, and supports acquisition and expansion activities aligned with the company&#8217;s long-term objectives. Joey serves as President of the Texas Short Line and Regional Railroad Association (TSLRRA) and is a member of the TxDOT Freight Advisory Committee. His career spans various leadership roles across the short line railroad industry. Prior to his current position, he led Customer Success for TNW, encompassing customer service, revenue protection, and infrastructure technology. His journey began as a conductor and engineer, where hands-on experience laid the foundation for his transition into management.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>About TNW Corporation<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tnwcorporation.com\/\">TNW Corporation<\/a> owns and operates three short line railroads \u2014 TXNW Railway, TXGN Railway, and TXR Railway \u2014 along with multiple rail logistics facilities across Texas, serving as a strategic supply chain partner to industries, shippers, fleet managers, and Class I railroads. With more than 40 years of transportation logistics experience, TNW delivers the efficiency, reliability, and customer service that keep North American commerce moving. TXNW Railway, operating in the Texas Panhandle since 1982, is a One-Stop Supercenter and boasts the largest privately owned railcar storage capacity in the United States. TXGN Railway, also a One-Stop Supercenter, has served central Texas since 1992, operating approximately 67 miles of storage and loop track with Union Pacific interchange. TXR Railway, based in Brownwood, serves the Camp Bowie Industrial Area and interchanges with BNSF Railroad. TNW&#8217;s full suite of services includes rapid interchange, transloading, railcar storage, repair, cleaning, scrapping, warehousing, and rail-served industrial development.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Key Takeaways: Short Lines, Big Impact: How Short Line Railroads Power America\u2019s Supply Chain<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul class=\"ul1\">\n<li class=\"li1\"><span data-teams=\"true\">In \u201cShort Lines, Big Impact: How Short Line Railroads Power America\u2019s Supply Chain\u201d <span class=\"s1\">Joe Ly<\/span><span class=\"s1\">n<\/span><span class=\"s1\">ch<\/span> and Joey Evans, Senior Director, Government Affairs &amp; Business Development, TNW Corporation, discuss how Class III short line railroads leverage technology, sustainability, and first-and-last-mile service to keep American commerce moving.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">Revenue, Not Track Length, Defines Railroad Classes: Railroad classification is strictly determined by annual revenue, not physical distance. Class I railroads (the &#8220;interstates&#8221; like BNSF and UP) exceed $1 billion in annual revenue, Class II regional railroads fall between $1 billion and $47 million, and Class III short lines\u2014where TNW Corporation operates\u2014fall below $47 million.<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">Short Lines Serve as the &#8220;First and Last Mile&#8221; for Rural America: While Class I railroads excel at long-distance freight movement, North America\u2019s 615 short line railroads provide essential first- and last-mile service to industrial parks and rural communities. Operating in smaller towns (often under 15,000 people), short lines keep vital agricultural, manufacturing, and petrochemical hubs connected to the national rail network.<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">Lowering the Barrier to Entry with Truck-to-Rail Conversions: Because one railcar holds the equivalent capacity of four trucks (4:1 ratio), TNW launched a dedicated logistics and transloading business. This allows smaller regional shippers within a 50-to-100-mile radius to enjoy the economic benefits of rail by breaking bulk rail loads down into local trucks, without requiring a massive capital investment in dedicated track infrastructure.<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">High-Volume Commodities and Major Public-Private Infrastructure Investments: Short lines primarily handle heavy, bulk commodities like petrochemicals, plastics, lumber, agricultural yields, and construction aggregates (rock). To support these loads, short lines reinvest a massive 33% to 50% of their annual revenue into infrastructure, a timeline accelerated by federal CRISI (Consolidated Rail Infrastructure Safety Improvement) grants to expand track fluidity.<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">Transitioning from Rail&#8217;s Historic &#8220;Black Hole&#8221; to High-Tech Visibility: Spurred by rising post-COVID consumer expectations (the &#8220;Amazon experience&#8221;), TNW developed a proprietary digital portal called <i>My TNW<\/i>. This tool eliminates the historic visibility &#8220;black hole&#8221; of rail shipping by providing customers with complete data transparency, allowing them to track cars across both TNW property and intersecting Class I networks.<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">Embracing AI and Autonomous Infrastructure Safety: The rail industry is heavily adopting AI, autonomous railcars, and automated track inspection tools. These automated systems travel the lines to instantly pinpoint structural micro-cracks, gauge misalignments, or railcar defects. Removing the human error factor from these tedious inspections helped the rail sector chart its safest operational year in its 200-year history in 2025.<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">Meeting Corporate ESG Targets Through &#8220;Clean and Green&#8221; Operations: Rail remains one of the most inherently sustainable modes of land transportation, moving a ton of freight roughly 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel. Beyond fuel efficiency, TNW helps shippers meet strict corporate environmental goals by certifying all properties under <i>Operation Clean Sweep<\/i>, which enforces strict handling frameworks to prevent plastic pellets and commodities from spilling into local ecosystems.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><strong>Learn More About Short Lines, Big Impact: How Short Line Railroads Power America\u2019s Supply Chain<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/joey-e-8262373b3\/\">Joey Evans | Linkedin<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/tnw-corporation\/\">TNW Corporation | Linkedin<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/tnwcorporation\/\">TNW Corporation | Instagram<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/tnwcorporation\/\">TNW Corporation | Facebook<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCiaHoxM2ysGuOXfTiSvvhog\">TNW Corporation | YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tnwcorporation.com\/\">TNW Corporation<\/a><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"p1\"><b>The Logistics of Logistics Podcast<\/b><\/h2>\n<ul class=\"ul1\">\n<li class=\"li1\">If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues.<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">The Logistics of Logistics Podcast:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.google.com\/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVsb2xwb2RjYXN0LmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz\"><span class=\"s1\">Google<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/the-logistics-of-logistics-podcast\/id1409735368\"><span class=\"s1\">Apple<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelogisticsoflogistics.com\/\"><span class=\"s1\">Castbox<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/2R6BcnTSREZ7fOx9EIoI36?si=9SxorwsJTOicUq7hOEQaYQ\"><span class=\"s1\">Spotify<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.stitcher.com\/podcast\/dancewaves\/the-logistics-of-logistics\"><span class=\"s1\">Stitcher<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/player.fm\/series\/the-logistics-of-logistics-podcast\"><span class=\"s1\">PlayerFM<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/tun.in\/pi548\"><span class=\"s1\">Tunein<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/podcast-detail\/dtyrb-7364a\/The-Logistics-of-Logistics-Podcast\"><span class=\"s1\">Podbean<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.owltail.com\/podcast\/23776-The-Logistics-of-Logistics-Podcast\/episodes\"><span class=\"s1\">Owltail<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/directory.libsyn.com\/shows\/view\/id\/thelolpodcast\"><span class=\"s1\">Libsyn<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/overcast.fm\/itunes1409735368\/the-logistics-of-logistics-podcast\"><span class=\"s1\">Overcast<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCQPVXYJLkj3mIceUYPIOedA\"><span class=\"s3\">Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div><div class=\"accordian fusion-accordian\" style=\"--awb-border-size:1px;--awb-icon-size:13px;--awb-content-font-size:16px;--awb-icon-alignment:left;--awb-hover-color:#f9f9f9;--awb-border-color:#cccccc;--awb-background-color:#ffffff;--awb-divider-color:#7d66e8;--awb-divider-hover-color:#e0dede;--awb-icon-color:#7d66e8;--awb-title-color:#7d66e8;--awb-content-color:#777777;--awb-icon-box-color:#333333;--awb-toggle-hover-accent-color:#be75d8;--awb-title-font-family:&quot;Karla&quot;;--awb-title-font-weight:700;--awb-title-font-style:normal;--awb-content-font-family:&quot;Karla&quot;;--awb-content-font-style:normal;--awb-content-font-weight:400;\"><div class=\"panel-group fusion-toggle-icon-unboxed\" id=\"accordion-10927-1\"><div class=\"fusion-panel panel-default panel-7c41cc30114216578 fusion-toggle-has-divider\" style=\"--awb-title-color:#7d66e8;--awb-content-color:#777777;\"><div class=\"panel-heading\"><h4 class=\"panel-title toggle\" id=\"toggle_7c41cc30114216578\"><a aria-expanded=\"false\" aria-controls=\"7c41cc30114216578\" role=\"button\" data-toggle=\"collapse\" data-parent=\"#accordion-10927-1\" data-target=\"#7c41cc30114216578\" href=\"#7c41cc30114216578\"><span class=\"fusion-toggle-icon-wrapper\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><i class=\"fa-fusion-box active-icon fa-angle-down fas\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><i class=\"fa-fusion-box inactive-icon fa-angle-down fas\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/i><\/span><span class=\"fusion-toggle-heading\">Read Transcript<\/span><\/a><\/h4><\/div><div id=\"7c41cc30114216578\" class=\"panel-collapse collapse \" aria-labelledby=\"toggle_7c41cc30114216578\"><div class=\"panel-body toggle-content fusion-clearfix\">\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> <span class=\"s2\">[00:00:00]<\/span> Hello, friends. Welcome to the Logistics of Logistics show. My name is Joe Lynch. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today&#8217;s topic is Short Lines, Big Impact, how short line railroads power America&#8217;s supply chains, with Joey Evans. How&#8217;s it going, Joey?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> I&#8217;m doing great, Joe. Thank you for having me<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> I&#8217;m excited to talk to you about railroads today because I feel like I don&#8217;t know enough.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">W- before we hit record, we were talking about that. I always assume that my audience is similar <span class=\"s2\">[00:00:30]<\/span> to me and go, &#8220;Yeah, I kinda, I understand what a railroad is. Have one rail move.&#8221; But so hopefully you can educate us today. So Joey, please introduce yourself and your company and where you&#8217;re calling from today.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, Joey Evans Senior Director of Government Affairs and Business Development for T&amp;W Corporation. And I&#8217;m calling out of Dallas, Texas<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> So what does TNW do?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. So we are a transportation and logistics company that specializes in <span class=\"s2\">[00:01:00]<\/span> short line railroads based here in Texas Dallas to be specific with short line railroads positioned around the state generally in rural communities<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. So I&#8217;m gonna keep asking basic questions all day today. You kn- you know that. So we have class I railroads, and those are the big ones. And then there&#8217;s the class II railroads. By the way, is there anything beyond that, or is it just class I and class II?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. So there&#8217;s three different, three different tiers of <span class=\"s2\">[00:01:30]<\/span> railroads. You have the Class I railroads, which you just mentioned, which are your big Class Is, which are BNSF, Union Pacific, CSXT,<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> We all see those. They dr- they go by hundreds<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Everybody sees those, right? And so then you get into your Class II railroads, which are considered your regional railroads, which more common like Florida East Coast Railway, Iowa Interstate, and then you get down into the short line railroads.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And so what separates those is not the <span class=\"s2\">[00:02:00]<\/span> length of the track that someone has. It&#8217;s based on revenue or annual revenue. So for instance, it&#8217;s been adjusted every few years for inflation, but the number right now is just over a billion dollars in annual revenue makes you a Class I rev&#8211; or Class I railroad. When you get between one billion and forty-seven million, that is a Class II railroad, and then below forty-seven million that is what is considered a Class III or your typical short line <span class=\"s2\">[00:02:30]<\/span> railroad.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. And we talking about class two or class three today<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s correct. Yes, sir. That&#8217;s what&#8230; class III is where T&amp;W Corporation, that&#8217;s where we fall as far as annual revenue goes. And we are, we don&#8217;t have any class II railroads<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. It&#8217;s interesting to me, I said this to you the other day. Railroads sometimes and you go, &#8220;Where&#8217;s that? I never see a train on that one.&#8221; And until I started this podcast, I used to drive by this one rail railroad tracks, and I&#8217;d <span class=\"s2\">[00:03:00]<\/span> go, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s like an abandoned train. I wonder what, I wonder where it used to go to.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And I didn&#8217;t ever think of class two or class three railroads. What are their purpose? I get the big ones. They go cross-country. Give&#8211; what are the shorter ones for?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. Great point on seeing the big railroads go across the the highway per se is I relate it to the interstate highway system that moves east, west, north, and south. And so those, the big railroads they <span class=\"s2\">[00:03:30]<\/span> really thrive in moving trains at a long distance. When you get into the short line railroads, what we serve is the rural communities that the first and last mile. And we talked about the six big railroads. There&#8217;s 615 short line railroads scattered across North America, uh, which generally all fall into rural communities. For instance, when you look at, when you look at our properties located in Dumas, Texas, <span class=\"s2\">[00:04:00]<\/span> Brownwood, Texas, and Gonzales, Texas, those are just small communities, less<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> No pro sports teams there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><span class=\"s4\"> Costcos<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Not yet. Texas will eventually get &#8217;em in every city<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> And generally towns of less than 15,000 people, and these are the blue-collar workers of America that are making the goods that we use every<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">day<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> So these short lines, what&#8217;s their purpose? I&#8217;m, I&#8217;ve seen some, they tend to be in industrial areas. What are <span class=\"s2\">[00:04:30]<\/span> they doing?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. So they are the first and last mile of most of the products that you&#8217;re utilizing today. So as you see these manufacturers and smaller businesses that are making a product or distributing a product out to the community, we&#8217;re the guys that are offering the white glove service to these communities and serving what would otherwise be an abandoned rail line.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">You, you talked a minute ago, Joe, about, driving by these railroad tracks for so many years and not seeing, a- activity on, <span class=\"s2\">[00:05:00]<\/span> on them. What happened in the early &#8217;80s with the Staggers Act was these Class One railroads, they realized that they had a real niche of being able to move, long distances and doing it very well. And so when you had these underutilized communities that needed goods to the national network or coming into their local communities, these short line railroads spun off. And so w- what it allowed small business owners to do was to come <span class=\"s2\">[00:05:30]<\/span> in and to really figure out how they could serve their local communities and provide a service that was otherwise missing<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. Where does TNW fit in this?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. We, as I mentioned, we&#8217;re a short line holding company here in Dallas and our three properties, we&#8217;ve been in business for 44 years now, going into 45 next year. And we started with our key railroad, which is TX&amp;W Railway in Dumas. Started as just a small railroad that <span class=\"s2\">[00:06:00]<\/span> served just a couple of customers. Since then, we&#8217;ve been able to invest in not only our infrastructure, but also into the community and help grow that single railroad into having the largest rail car storage facility in North America, and we&#8217;ll talk more about that as well.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> who are your customers?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. So it varies. And so when you look at, when you look at a majority of our customers in the northern region, which is Dumas, it&#8217;s a lot of agriculture and a lot of <span class=\"s2\">[00:06:30]<\/span> petrochemical. So from a refinery to your grain elevators that are moving product either to the Gulf Coast or from the Gulf Coast or out of the Midwest to serve the local farmers. When you look in like Gonzales, which is located in the, what we call the Golden Triangle of Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Austin area, a lot of that is plastics coming out of the Gulf Coast. But then you also have a lot of agricultural products coming in and out as <span class=\"s2\">[00:07:00]<\/span> long as aggregates<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> So obviously all of the stuff you guys move has to be moved, and it could easily, I&#8217;m assuming, be moved by trucks also. But they choose rail because I&#8217;m gonna I&#8217;m gonna s-say my layman&#8217;s version of this. They&#8217;re picking rail because it&#8217;s a certain type of freight that, that&#8217;s conducive to rail. Not everything is.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But if it&#8217;s a lot of volume <span class=\"s2\">[00:07:30]<\/span> it, it works. If it&#8217;s not a lot of volume, it&#8217;s probably not a good fit. There&#8217;s no less than truckload or a version over there in your business<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Y- that&#8217;s a, that&#8217;s such a great topic to talk about &#8217;cause y- yes, for the most part, and I would go back to work, we&#8217;ll call it 10 years ago, that was really the case. You moved a lot of volume. It was conducive to rail longer distances, generally over 100 miles. But back in 2016 and &#8217;17, we took a <span class=\"s2\">[00:08:00]<\/span> look at that space and figured out that there were probably a lot more customers within a 50 to 100-mile radius that didn&#8217;t necessarily have the volume that would be conducive to rail, but they had a need for it. And when you look at truck-to-rail conversion, it&#8217;s about four to one. So for every four trucks, that&#8217;s one rail car. So We then spun up our logistics business at that point in time, where we went out in that 100-mile circle and we talked to the different farmers and different people that still <span class=\"s2\">[00:08:30]<\/span> had a need, but maybe not the volume. And thence our our logistics business was born. So what we do on that side of our business is they&#8217;ll bring in a product, generally we&#8217;ll call it one rail car every now and then and then we actually perform the work for them. So we&#8217;ll offload the product into the trucks of their choosing, and then they&#8217;ll truck it out to, within, their 20 mile, 50 mile radius, whatever that looks like. And so what that allows them to <span class=\"s2\">[00:09:00]<\/span> do is not to have to invest the capital into steel in the ground infrastructure that may be a little bit out of, their financial means, but they can still get product to that area. And that&#8217;s been a great business for us over the last 10 years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> come back and talk more about this in a minute because I think there&#8217;s some exciting things happening in the rail business. And the reason I say it that way is the business has always been hidden compared to the rest of the logistics business. The logistics business is, <span class=\"s2\">[00:09:30]<\/span> very sales driven.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">They&#8217;re chasing you down. You gotta call a few times usually to talk to somebody on the railroad. And I think I was talking to somebody about this a year or two ago and they said we kinda know what freight moves on our on our systems well, and if it doesn&#8217;t, then we&#8217;re not interested.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So they&#8217;re not looking for everybody. Where v- trucking companies, for the most part, say, &#8220;If it moves, we&#8217;ll move it.&#8221; So it&#8217;s a it&#8217;s a specific kind of f- solution. <span class=\"s2\">[00:10:00]<\/span> But it&#8217;s a great solution for the stuff. And again, there&#8217;s a sustainability angle and there&#8217;s a get the trucks off the road angle, which I think is we love our truckers, we love our trucking companies, but we don&#8217;t like, love congestion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> And you&#8211; to your point, when you look at the truck and rail industry, a lot of people see the competitiveness in between the two, right? Of always trying to work to look at how do we remove trucks off of the<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">highway.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><span class=\"s4\"> it? Yeah<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> And that&#8217;s a big piece of it, but <span class=\"s2\">[00:10:30]<\/span> also too, trucking really complements our business really well. And so we look at how do we form those relationships with the truckers to pull some of the product off by rail, but then to give the truckers a shorter haul, that way they can be more fluid in their business as<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">well<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> I like it. I like it. So Joey, tell us a little bit about you. Where&#8217;d you grow up? Where&#8217;d you go to school? Some career highlights before you joined the mothership, TNW<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, so I grew up in a small town in South Georgia, <span class=\"s2\">[00:11:00]<\/span> Sylvester, Georgia and had the normal, age of growing up, playing high school sports and always had these dreams that I was gonna be a Major League Baseball star. Obviously, that didn&#8217;t work out very well if you and I are talking about railroading today. But I, out of high school, I realized pretty quickly that college probably wasn&#8217;t gonna be for me long term. Sports was not gonna be an option anymore. And so I had a buddy of mine that worked at the railroad as an engineer <span class=\"s2\">[00:11:30]<\/span> and he talked about how good of a life he had. He said, it&#8217;s a lot of travel, a lot of being away from home,&#8221; but it was a really a long-term investment into your career. And so I said I wanna sign up.&#8221; And so about 25 years ago, I started my career as a conductor at Norfolk Southern. I worked my way through being an engineer and into management, uh, and then got introduced into the short line world <span class=\"s2\">[00:12:00]<\/span> after, for me being gone all the time just was not something as my kids were growing up that I just, I wanted to do.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So got introduced into the short line world where it really is a more family-friendly lifestyle to where you&#8217;re home a majority of the weekends and at night. And so in 2000 and 2008, I made that jump into the short line world, uh, and moved around a little bit until I found my <span class=\"s2\">[00:12:30]<\/span> home here at T&amp;W almost nine years ago. And it&#8217;s just a such a remarkable company that I can grow with and that I can help others customers and potential customers succeed at<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. You&#8217;re not the first one to say, &#8220;I joined the railroad because I wasn&#8217;t sure what I wanted to do, and I didn&#8217;t think I wanted to go the college route.&#8221; And I think, I&#8217;m trying to think of the na- guy&#8217;s name &#8217;cause it&#8217;s been a few years, but I interviewed a guy who&#8217;s either president or CEO of one of the one of the class one <span class=\"s2\">[00:13:00]<\/span> railroads.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And he said, there&#8217;s a progression.&#8221; And he said &#8220;&#8216;Cause I started at the bottom at the railroad company.&#8221; He goes, &#8220;And I just kept moving up.&#8221; And he said &#8220;It&#8217;s a nice life.&#8221; And I think his&#8230; I think he said his son was joining the railroad. And he said, because he goes, &#8220;It was attractive to him.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. It&#8217;s not uncommon, Joe, to see in our industry fourth and fifth gen- fifth generation railroaders. We have several people within the company that are, second and third people, or second and third generation <span class=\"s2\">[00:13:30]<\/span> railroaders<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> There&#8217;s a musician Sturgill Simpson, and I heard him talk on I think it was Joe Rogan&#8217;s show. This is years ago. And he was talking about how he was working, and he goes, &#8220;I worked at the railroad,&#8221; and I wor- I forget which one. And he said, &#8220;I had a nice life. We had a nice life, my wife and I.&#8221; And he said he goes I kept thinking I, I wanna take a shot at this music.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">He goes, &#8220;But I had opportunities there, and I could see a very nice life for us there.&#8221; And he said, &#8220;So it was really tough to say, &#8216;Okay, I&#8217;m gonna quit the day job <span class=\"s2\">[00:14:00]<\/span> and go do this full time.'&#8221; Obviously, it worked out for him, but not for everyone. Anyway we have a whole bunch of things I wanna talk about.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So we&#8217;ve talked about Class 1 railroads, and those are the big ones that I think, the&#8211; when you get stopped at the rail crossing, you see those. So those are the ones that you mentioned earlier, the BN- BNSF, Norfolk Southern, all those. We see those, and those are Class 1 railroads. And those I&#8217;m assuming they go <span class=\"s2\">[00:14:30]<\/span> thousands of miles across the country.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Now, the short lines, they&#8217;re, the, whether it&#8217;s Class 1 or Cla- whether it&#8217;s Class 2 or Class 3, those aren&#8217;t classified by how long they are. They&#8217;re classified by revenue. Not su- not super important to us as shippers, but when I look at these Class 2 and Class 3 are they five miles? Are they 10 miles?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Are they 100 miles long? How long are these short line railroads?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s such a great question, and it <span class=\"s2\">[00:15:00]<\/span> completely varies. When you look at I talked about our properties that we have, our TSR Railway in Brownwood, Texas, is only six miles long. So that&#8217;s what most people think of when they hear the term short line railroad. They think, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s just very short.&#8221; But then you also take the same short line railroad as Rapid City, Pierre &amp; Eastern, which is a Genesee &amp; Wyoming railroad, and it&#8217;s 600 miles long. So there, there&#8217;s no variation you know<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> 600, <span class=\"s2\">[00:15:30]<\/span> miles of Wyoming, you might only bump into what? Three, four people.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> It if you look at, if you look at the RCPE Railroad, for instance that one and Genesee Wyoming is the holding company, but it stretches the entire state of South Dakota,<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">right? And<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> so those states, there&#8217;s a lot of extraction, there&#8217;s a lot of agriculture. So anything that comes out of the ground, I&#8217;m assuming is a really good fit for rail. Agriculture&#8217;s a good fit for rail. Now are these class two, <span class=\"s2\">[00:16:00]<\/span> class three, are they moving oil also?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> There are some movements of oil. We move a lot of petrochemical products out of our TS&amp;W Railway in Dumas down into the Gulf Coast out of, comes out of a refinery in Dumas and goes down into the Gulf Coast in different regions and down into Mexico<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> the other day I was stopped as a railroad stop and I was just paying attention to all the the different types of cars and a lot of them were <span class=\"s2\">[00:16:30]<\/span> tanker cars. And somebody said to me the other day, I think they said, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s 40% are tankers cars.&#8221; I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s that high on all railroads, but I thought that&#8217;s, that&#8211; And that speaks to it being some sort of chemical<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s exactly right. And y- and I would say that number&#8217;s probably pretty accurate. I think when people look at those tank cars, they always generally try to associate it with hazardous materials, and that&#8217;s not always the case. There&#8217;s a lot of <span class=\"s2\">[00:17:00]<\/span> non-hazardous, even agricultural materials like palm oil and beef tallow that move in those cars, corn syrup and so forth. And, You look at hazardous materials just for a minute, talking about these tank cars, one staggering fact is 99.9% of all shipments that are moved by rail, hazardous materials are moved safely across the network with no interruptions, no issues at all. And, that&#8217;s a staggering number when you look at the <span class=\"s2\">[00:17:30]<\/span> number of rail cars that move across North America<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">every year<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> This is a little bit of an aside, and if I can find the article, I&#8217;ll put a link to it in the show notes. By the way, I&#8217;ll make sure I put a link to your LinkedIn profile, link to y- your website, any other links you and your go-to-market team give me, I&#8217;ll make sure I put those in the show notes so people can reach out and talk to you.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">I saw an article, I th- I wanna say it was in Forbes, and it said, &#8220;What&#8217;s the best way to move oil?&#8221; And I know we&#8217;re not talking about moving oil here today, but they said you can move <span class=\"s2\">[00:18:00]<\/span> it by rail, you can move it by truck, you can move it by barge. You can also move it by pipelines. And so somebody wrote the article, &#8220;What&#8217;s best?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And they said, &#8220;Depending what best means.&#8221; And a pipeline&#8217;s pretty efficient if you say this is gonna be going for a while. Now, are they always safe? I think the&#8211; I think we can make them safe, but what&#8217;s interesting about it is I remember, I forgot which <span class=\"s2\">[00:18:30]<\/span> pipeline it was, where they said, &#8220;Oh, we shut down this pipeline,&#8221; and every&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Not against the environmentalism, but the, it&#8217;s can get a little silly in that oil is pumped out of the ground. It is going to be transported to market. Do you want it to go by pipeline? No. Okay, we shut the pipeline down. Good. It&#8217;s going by barge or truck or rail. They&#8217;re not throwing the oil away.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">They&#8217;re not pumping it. It&#8217;s getting pumped out of the ground. Somebody paid a lot of money to get it pumped, and they had approval to get it <span class=\"s2\">[00:19:00]<\/span> pumped, and they still have the approval to pump that oil. So if I can find that article, but I thought it was very interesting when they said, &#8220;What&#8217;s the best way?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">You go, &#8220;Depends what best means.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That, that&#8217;s exactly right. And it, it also depends on what the market&#8217;s doing at the current time. As you just talked about, as they&#8217;re pumping, they&#8217;re gonna continue pumping it out of the ground. I think, one of the, one of the things when you look at the rail industry as a whole, when you look at the fluctuating markets and, is there a geopolitical <span class=\"s2\">[00:19:30]<\/span> event going on in the world<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yes, there is.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That that, that&#8217;s causing certain fluctuations in the market, is you look at, and you can take any one of the major plastics companies, refineries, whatever business you wanna choose, they&#8217;re not gonna shut their production down just because of an event going on.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">What they have to do is they have to figure out what&#8217;s&#8211; how do they become flexible during that time? Because I can guarantee you it costs them a <span class=\"s2\">[00:20:00]<\/span> lot more to shut production down for a single day than it is for them just to continue producing and figure out, &#8220;Okay, am I gonna store this product somewhere during that timeframe, or what does that look<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">like?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> It&#8217;s interesting. So I remember talking about a pipeline with a friend, and I said, &#8220;Yeah, they&#8217;re no, no longer pumping that oil through the pipeline, but it is going in on trucks or rail.&#8221; And I said, &#8220;So if, God forbid, there&#8217;s a flipped over truck with oil, that&#8217;s <span class=\"s2\">[00:20:30]<\/span> obviously a bad thing. It c- but the oil is still coming out of the ground.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Anyway so the other day we met and I asked you, could you put together some points &#8217;cause I&#8217;m not smart enough to talk about short line railroads with you. So you were kind enough to put together five t- topics to talk about today. So the first one, first topic is why short line railro- railroads matter more than ever.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. Yeah, so first point. Yeah so first point goes back <span class=\"s2\">[00:21:00]<\/span> to the conversation we had earlier about being the first and last mile and being able to serve those communities and just kinda give you a brief overview of kinda how T&amp;W works at and, through my business development role. As we&#8217;re out meeting with potential opportunities the ability for us to be flexible and agile with these customers and potential opportunities is far more superior than a lot of a lot of larger companies can just because there, there&#8217;s a very short <span class=\"s2\">[00:21:30]<\/span> distance between my office and the CEO of our company, Paul Triangan&#8217;s office. And so as we&#8217;re out meeting with those opportunities and we&#8217;re sitting down our first question is always, &#8220;What does success look like for you?&#8221; Which is a breath of fresh air for a lot of these companies that they generally don&#8217;t, they don&#8217;t hear. And so we work backwards, and once we figure out what their long-term goal and success looks like, we take that back and figure out a plan. How can we <span class=\"s2\">[00:22:00]<\/span> land them on one of our properties? How can we scale them up to where they need to be? and and that is what all short line railroads are all about,<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> so Joey, give me an example, and you don&#8217;t have to use a name. If you can use a name, great, but if you can&#8217;t, give me an example of what they&#8217;re moving and where they&#8217;re moving it. What&#8217;s point A? What&#8217;s point B for them?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. So when you look at, we&#8217;ll use Texas in the Gonzales region, for instance, where our TSGN Railway is located. We have a new brick-and-mortar <span class=\"s2\">[00:22:30]<\/span> customer that just came online. That was a a process of getting them onboarded, but they&#8217;re moving lumber out of the Pacific Northwest. When you look at, when you look at that Gonzales-Austin market, we use Austin as the kind of everybody knows where Austin is at. There&#8217;s so many new home starts that are happening in that region that all of that lumber&#8217;s coming out of the Pacific Northwest or either East Coast Pines coming out to build those homes. So all of that product&#8217;s <span class=\"s2\">[00:23:00]<\/span> funneling into us, and they&#8217;ll<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> And where do you pick it up at?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> So we get our products specifically, at Gonzales location, Union Pacific is our class one railroad that we interchange with, and so we interchange with them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> in all cases?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Nope. Ju- just for that specific short line. Uh, BNSF is a partner to us up at T, S, and W and at Brownwood, and then we have Union Pacific at TSGN. So we&#8217;ll pick that up from Union Pacific five days a week, and then we&#8217;ll haul <span class=\"s2\">[00:23:30]<\/span> it about 12 miles into Gonzales to our different customers around what we call town. Uh, and then we&#8217;ll spot &#8217;em every day, and we&#8217;ll pick &#8217;em up and take &#8217;em back to the national network<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> So this stuff&#8217;s coming out of the Pacific Northwest on which railroad?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><span class=\"s4\"> Union<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Pacific I&#8217;m assuming it gets t-taken from some sort of lumber facility to a rail yard, rail head, whatever you wanna call that. They load that into the rail cars. How long does it take to get from up there down to <span class=\"s2\">[00:24:00]<\/span> Texas?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Yeah, so generally what I see is somewhere between four and seven days<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> So it&#8217;s a little longer than truck, but it&#8217;s also you&#8217;re getting four times,<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s right<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> four time- if four truckloads fit into one rail car. So if it&#8217;s super, if you&#8217;re moving something, it&#8217;s obviously not an expedite, it&#8217;s obviously not n- there&#8217;s a lot of things that&#8217;s not, but what it is high volume.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So you could fill a whole bunch of trucks, I&#8217;m sorry, a whole bunch of cars with <span class=\"s2\">[00:24:30]<\/span> and then haul that down there. So s- you pick it up somewhere in Texas at your short line. Now how does that, how does that&#8211; What&#8217;s the handoff look like? &#8216;Cause I&#8217;ve, I understand short line, I understand nice&#8230; Is this one of the things where they do the r- the rail exchange?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">How does that mo- how does that work?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, so it, it&#8217;s called an interchange. And so generally they&#8217;ll bring it in the Union Pacific will use them in this example. They&#8217;ll bring it in to a specific track. <span class=\"s2\">[00:25:00]<\/span> They&#8217;ll set off a group of cars for us and then they&#8217;ll pick up a group of cars from us that&#8217;s going back<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> So they drop this off. It&#8217;s not like a live load. They dropped it off and when you guys are ready, you pick it up<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s correct. Yeah. So and generally for us, just as a specific example, they&#8217;ll drop off their rail cars to us at about five AM, Monday through Friday, and they&#8217;ll pick up that afternoon or either right then depending on kind of what that looks like, and they&#8217;ll take back to San <span class=\"s2\">[00:25:30]<\/span> Antonio and distribute out. and and that kind of leads into when you ask about the specifics of an interchange. Up until about five years ago, we had some challenges at our interchange because it was a single track, right? So if you think about it, if I go put cars out there for Union Pacific to pick up there&#8217;s nowhere for them to bring us our cars. And What we&#8217;ve done through some government grant programs, which is called, it&#8217;s called CRISI for short, <span class=\"s2\">[00:26:00]<\/span> C-R-I-S-I, Consolidated Rail Infrastructure Safety Improvement. Through that grant program we were awarded, uh, the opportunity to then spend that funding to build out our interchange.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So we created two interchange tracks. We lengthened them. Uh, we worked on some bridges, and now we have two tracks that can be interchanged to and from UP to make it more fluid<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. So when you pick it up, where are you taking those things to?<span class=\"s2\">[00:26:30]<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, so we take it into our no matter w-which railroad we&#8217;re talking about, we take it into our serving yard where we will then classify those rail cars by customer, by commodity<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Thinking back to that lumber example, where do you take&#8230; So you gotta, you go, you said 12 miles or however many miles. Are you taking it to lumber distribution companies, or where, who are you taking it to?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, so in that specific case, it&#8217;s going to a truss manufacturer. Their <span class=\"s2\">[00:27:00]<\/span> name is Synergos. They are based out of Arizona located,<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> they&#8217;re do- so they&#8217;re building a lot of the houses prefab in a way.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s correct. Yes, sir. That&#8217;s correct.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> It&#8217;s not really prefab, I guess they&#8217;re just doing some of the assembly i- in a facility rather than at the job site<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s correct. Yeah, they&#8217;ll bring in the lumber, make the truss, and then it will&#8211; the truss will get trucked out to the sites<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Okay. Very nice. Very nice. Obviously you can move<span class=\"s2\">[00:27:30]<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">lumber by truck also, but they&#8217;re choosing to do it this way. I know you&#8217;re not trying to convince somebody not to do it with rail. What would be a reason they wouldn&#8217;t do it with with rail? What doesn&#8217;t work for you guys? &#8216;Cause I know there&#8217;s lumber moving, you see it on the highway.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">What wouldn&#8217;t work for you? Or, and when I see it on the highway, is that more likely to be short runs?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, that&#8217;s exactly right. So I think when you look at what doesn&#8217;t work for us and there&#8217;s, uh, there&#8217;s nothing that won&#8217;t work for us from a rail perspective. It&#8217;s really what is gonna be feasible <span class=\"s2\">[00:28:00]<\/span> for the customer. And, I use an example recently of sitting down with someone that was looking to potentially bring rail into one of our railroads. And as we sit down and looked at the mathematics and realized that the run was just gonna be too short for them, it was only like 37 miles it didn&#8217;t make, it didn&#8217;t make financial sense for them to try to do that, or from an operations standpoint for them because the rail cars, if they got <span class=\"s2\">[00:28:30]<\/span> loaded, would have to go to San Antonio or Amarillo to then get distributed back to us, and by that point in time, they could have moved a number of trucks. And so o- one of the things that we&#8217;re really good at is being okay with telling the customer, &#8220;Hey, w- we don&#8217;t think this is gonna help you be successful.&#8221; And so we&#8217;re comfortable enough in the services that we do offer that we can tell a customer, &#8220;Hey, it&#8217;s probably gonna be better for you to ship by truck.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Not <span class=\"s2\">[00:29:00]<\/span> ideal for us, but more feasible for the customer, and they will remember that long<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. So what are some of the typical products or commodities that you guys are moving?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> So petrochemical plastics you&#8217;ve got lumber, you&#8217;ve got aggregates, a lot of agriculture whether it be wheat,<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Now when you say aggregates, that could be like potassium and stuff like that?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> G-generally when we talk about aggregates, we&#8217;re thinking in more terms of rock. So <span class=\"s2\">[00:29:30]<\/span> obviously when you look at Texas, everything is under construction at all times. And so there&#8217;s so many unit trains of rock aggregates that are moving for these highway projects. And again, complement to trucks and highways, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So we bring in the raw material, they&#8217;ll load it out and take it to the site itself where they&#8217;ll finish out a construction project.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. Yeah, so the, so what we&#8217;re talking about these chemical plastic aggregates. This is, I&#8211; This makes <span class=\"s2\">[00:30:00]<\/span> sense &#8217;cause I&#8217;ve seen all that stuff roll down the ex- the, on the highway. And again, I can understand where this is a big advantage if I&#8217;m bringing, let&#8217;s just, grain or corn or something to market that, that&#8217;s a com- a commodity that we&#8217;re gonna load up a truck with and lo-load a car with.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">I&#8217;m so used to talking to trucking people. No, I get it. This makes a lot of sense. One other thing, and please elaborate on this. Am I right to say railroads are <span class=\"s2\">[00:30:30]<\/span> paid for by the railroad companies?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> In, in some cases, yeah. So you have a number of different ways that you can get paid, right? So you have what we call interline settlement or Rule 11. I believe truckers are familiar with that process as well, to where you have a single entity, like the origin railroad is billing for the entire route of that rail car traveling, and then that money gets distributed to all the parties that handles it<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> what I what I meant is the <span class=\"s2\">[00:31:00]<\/span> actual rail, rails that you see. When you guys build the rail, you build the railroads, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, so generally those are all purchased from Class I railroad. So when we talked earlier<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">about this<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> the actual tracks, someone put the tracks down. You guys paid for all those, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That, that&#8217;s correct. Yeah. So<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> that&#8217;s unlike the expressways, which we pay for and then the trucking company&#8211; I&#8217;m not complaining, it&#8217;s just it&#8217;s a little different. So the infrastructure, you guys paid for it all. And you&#8211; instead there&#8217;s <span class=\"s2\">[00:31:30]<\/span> some grants, and I think the reason I ask about that is there&#8217;s a lot of economic development that comes from what you guys are doing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">It&#8217;s like a port. If you open up a port, it is n-not just any old business. It&#8217;s a business that drives trade, and that&#8217;s the same with railroads. They drive trade.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. When you look at talking about the infrastructure, the&#8211; when you look at the public or the private investment that we make back into our <span class=\"s2\">[00:32:00]<\/span> infrastructure, and so when you think about the majority of short lines that get purchased, and I-I&#8217;ll stick to short lines specifically, those railroads were sold for a specific reason, generally because infrastructure was outdated, it was old.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Some of that infrastructure that railroads are still operating on is over a hundred years old. And so when we purchase those railroads that are sometimes neglected, it takes a lot of private <span class=\"s2\">[00:32:30]<\/span> money going back into that infrastructure to build it up. When you look at you look at the gas prices from nineteen ninety-seven to today, the increase that you&#8217;ve seen, you take that same measurement and you look at the inflation of building infrastructure. Short line railroads like ourself, we&#8217;re putting thirty-three to fifty percent of our annual revenue back into new infrastructure, whether it be new build-outs and investments for our customers or whether it be maintenance projects. <span class=\"s2\">[00:33:00]<\/span> And so that&#8217;s where that public partnership of these CRISI grants they come into play because what it allows us to do is to speed up that infrastructure investment by about fifteen years which is something that typically we couldn&#8217;t do until I&#8217;m gonna call it five years ago, is where when the CRISI really got guaranteed and the IAJA allowed short line railroads to just really build out infrastructure at a quicker<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">rate.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> And <span class=\"s2\">[00:33:30]<\/span> we had at the ports during COVID, we had we had issues obviously there, front page news. And I imagine you guys were just swamped because everyone was trying to get stuff out of those ports. The railroad, I&#8217;m sure those guys were struggling because if&#8211; with those rail, those things come off of the boats, they&#8217;re a lot of time getting onto a probably class one railroad.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But during that time there was some issues and we had the we had the <span class=\"s2\">[00:34:00]<\/span> feds get involved and create some changes at the port on detention and demurrage. We learned some lessons, our supply chains worked pretty darn well. None of us it was a difficult time for a lot of families, but pretty good for a lot of trucking companies financially.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But we found some brittleness. What, what went on in your business? What did, what lessons did you guys learn from COVID?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> So I, for us, we learned a lot of different things, and number one was to continue or <span class=\"s2\">[00:34:30]<\/span> try to learn how to be even more agile and flexible than we were before. Customer demands changed during that time. People had a lot more time at home to where I, I&#8217;m gonna call it a re- a refreshment of the workforce and here&#8217;s what I mean by that. If you look at the average American spending 30 minutes to an hour in the car every morning commuting to work and then back home, that&#8217;s two hours of their day that is out of the office. <span class=\"s2\">[00:35:00]<\/span> What I found during COVID specifically was that more people were willing to learn dive into their work, read more books, study more things because they had<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Oh, pod- podcasts really took off during that time.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><span class=\"s4\"> Right<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yeah and by the way, I don&#8217;t know if this is true, but f- I think a lot of the podcasters I talked to saw such growth during that time, and then it all went back to<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> the the norm.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><span class=\"s4\"> yeah<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> And and then also too, you look at like Amazon, for <span class=\"s2\">[00:35:30]<\/span> instance, during COVID, and you look at the amount of packages and the amount of growth that Amazon had. And so people got used to what I call the Amazon experience. And so they then took that back to work and said if I can know where my package is, and I can know exactly when it&#8217;s 10 stops from my house and so forth, I wanna know the same thing about my rail car.&#8221; And so the questions really changed after COVID<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> But do you guys have visibility tools like similar <span class=\"s2\">[00:36:00]<\/span> to Project 44 or MacroPoint or all those tools that we use on the over-the-road stuff?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> We do. So back in r- during COVID and coming out of COVID, we developed our own tool in-house called My TNW which is powered from a company called Four Thirty Six Software. And so we built out this tool that allows complete transparency back to our customers. And so<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s brand new &#8217;cause I, my assumption, and this is the wrong way to say it, but I feel <span class=\"s2\">[00:36:30]<\/span> like rail is rail. When it gets picked up, it moves from Los Angeles to Chicago, and when somebody says can you tell me where it&#8217;s at?&#8221; Kinda. It left LA, usually it gets here to Chicago on this day.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Y- it&#8217;s a, there&#8217;s a timing, and if somebody says oh, it&#8217;s two hours away,&#8221; it kinda doesn&#8217;t matter in a way. It&#8217;s gonna get there when it gets there. There&#8217;s no expediting once it&#8217;s on that rail.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> It, it used to be it used to be called the black hole, right? With where&#8217;s my <span class=\"s2\">[00:37:00]<\/span> railcar at? It&#8217;s somewhere between Los Angeles and Atlanta. That&#8217;s all I know. But coming out of COVID, as those c- as those, questions changed, we went to work to try to figure out how can we give our customers a better experience? And so our customers today, when they log on to our portal, they can not only see the railcars that are on our property, but they can also see the railcars on other whether it be class one properties, and we can give them accurate dates of when the cars <span class=\"s2\">[00:37:30]<\/span> are gonna be at our property.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Um-<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> One other thing, and this is probably more of a class one problem than it is&#8211; perhaps it&#8217;s a class, perhaps it&#8217;s a short line problem, too. I&#8217;ve seen a lot of videos where people are stealing from these rail cars, and it&#8217;s a problem we have in the over-the-road trucking industry.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Cargo theft went from opportunistic to more strategic. And I was in Port of Long Beach for a <span class=\"s2\">[00:38:00]<\/span> conference, the IANA conference, highly recommend it, and I was talking to a guy and he said, &#8220;A lot of the people know,&#8221; he was talking about theft, he says, &#8220;They know the containers that it got off the boat, and they know what cars it&#8217;s getting on, and they know, and they&#8217;ll follow it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">If it&#8217;s an ex- if it&#8217;s a product, and again, I&#8217;m thinking drugs or electronics, they might say, &#8220;Yeah, we&#8217;re willing to follow that. We know where that truck, we know where that rail car is going, and we know they&#8217;re gonna stop <span class=\"s2\">[00:38:30]<\/span> at some point.&#8221; And d- do you guys, are you seeing theft in a an uptick in that?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Y- we don&#8217;t see it specifically at our properties, and we&#8217;ve done a good job. The way that we have our security system set up at all of our properties w- between cameras and different people that are monitoring our properties, we&#8217;ve eliminated any opportunity for someone to come onto our properties and steal product from us. Because that&#8217;s one of the requests and one of the demands of our customers. They were like, <span class=\"s2\">[00:39:00]<\/span> &#8220;We need to ensure that when we send a rail car to you, that it&#8217;s gonna be safe.&#8221; So we pivoted, you know, years ago and said, &#8220;Okay, if this is important to you, it&#8217;s now important to us.&#8221; And so we continuously look at how technology can help us to monitor our rail yards and to be able to provide that comfort and transparency.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> about stealing something, the commodities where it&#8217;s chemicals, plastic, aggregates, agriculture, you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh yeah, there&#8217;s a whole bunch of corn. I&#8217;m gonna take my pickup truck and we&#8217;re gonna steal all&#8230;&#8221; <span class=\"s2\">[00:39:30]<\/span> It&#8217;s not&#8211; You really would have to be very strategic about it, but let&#8217;s face it, this stuff is all valuable.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And I think as much as anything now, we&#8217;re worried about tampering. So if you&#8217;re moving corn or grain, you wanna say, &#8220;I&#8217;m delivering that to someone who&#8217;s gonna make food from it, so it has to be it has to be safe from the time I pick it to the time it gets to your table.&#8221; That&#8217;s the f- the food safety standards kinda require that of us.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s right. That&#8217;s<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> And by the way, similar with chemicals. There can be no <span class=\"s2\">[00:40:00]<\/span> contamination in your c-chemicals. I guess with your rocks, I don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t want anyone messing with my rocks. I don&#8217;t want &#8217;em ruined.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> When you look at, when you look at the commodities like corn you use, for instance, that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s so important for us as we are, hauling products or whether we&#8217;re transloading it for specific customers, each one of those rail cars and compartments have seals on them. So as we&#8217;re getting ready to unload a product or we&#8217;re inspecting a train, is we&#8217;re checking for those seals to <span class=\"s2\">[00:40:30]<\/span> ensure that the product is safe and secure. And if it&#8217;s not, then we then reach out to the customer and say, &#8220;Hey, this car arrived to us, and we noticed there&#8217;s a seal that&#8217;s been tampered with. What do you want to do?&#8221; And so it&#8217;s all part of, again, that&#8217;s that short line mentality that we offer back to customers is ensuring transparency, safety, security. And we, going back to our broad overview is we have such a large footprint at each one of our properties that <span class=\"s2\">[00:41:00]<\/span> we can hold multiple products during any kind of uptick or downtick in the market for someone, uh, which is not something that a lot of people can do.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Nobody seems to have extra cars anymore. That&#8217;s the same with I&#8217;m an automotive guy originally, and I always remember you would see in factories and you go, &#8220;What are those 10 trucks sitting out there for the last month?&#8221; And they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, y- adds a little bit of this, a little bit of that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And I was a I did <span class=\"s2\">[00:41:30]<\/span> lean facilitation, so we would always go are those acting as a warehouse?&#8221; Because that, we don&#8217;t like that. But y- it&#8217;s also, you used to see every time you go to any industrial facility, you see a con- shipping container and I go, &#8220;Do you own that?&#8221; And some of them are decommissioned, I understand.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">They may- maybe you bought it. There was a buddy of mine, he owns a, business not too far away, and I was taking football tickets over to his, and I go, &#8220;Dude this shipping container belongs to this company.&#8221; And he goes, &#8220;Yeah. They didn&#8217;t come <span class=\"s2\">[00:42:00]<\/span> get it, so we started storing stuff.&#8221; And I go, &#8220;Y- at some point, you&#8217;re gonna get charged for it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> That&#8217;s right &#8220;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> You better call them. S- they&#8217;re w- th-they&#8217;re they&#8217;re gonna find it eventually.&#8221; But a- anyway it&#8217;s nice that you guys can if, so if somebody has, says, &#8220;Hey, don&#8217;t ship that yet,&#8221; you can say, &#8220;We&#8217;ll wait. We&#8217;ll wait a week on this.&#8221; Not everyone&#8217;s got extra rail cars. So one of the other things I wanna talk about is sustainability.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">People come to you &#8217;cause they&#8217;re moving this kind of product, and they <span class=\"s2\">[00:42:30]<\/span> said, this is a less expensive way to move our product.&#8221; But it&#8217;s not just less expensive, it&#8217;s also more sustainable. Please elaborate.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. Goes back to the service, right? When you look at the, when you look at the cost and, not always is it always cheaper to ship by rail. And while, w-while some of those decisions that get made are s- are strictly based on finances, for us, what we see for sustainability <span class=\"s2\">[00:43:00]<\/span> is being able to provide that service, that same service over and over again.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And I&#8217;ll elaborate on that for just a minute. So T&amp;W, we&#8217;re a very metric-driven company. Everything that we do is built around a operating plan that has metrics that help hold us accountable to get better. Prime example of that, uh, back in 2017, when we established our metrics and three of the metrics that you see across the <span class=\"s2\">[00:43:30]<\/span> rail industry as a whole is what we call dwell. How long is a car sitting? Right car, right train, which is did my car make the right train that it was supposed to be moved to the next location? And how long did it take you to spot the car at my facility? And so that&#8217;s from a customer standpoint. So when we started that in 2017, we had these numbers that we thought were still really good numbers, and they were. But what we have done <span class=\"s2\">[00:44:00]<\/span> now is we&#8217;ve shortened that timeframe in such a manner to where our customers can rely on that. And so they know that their business will be sustainable day in, day out. And yes, it, and not from our standpoint, but from the cost of shipping a piece of product from the Pacific Northwest down to Gonzales. We don&#8217;t dictate what those rates are in between those two points, and so there may be ups and downs on those. But <span class=\"s2\">[00:44:30]<\/span> they know, &#8220;Hey, it may cost me a little bit more to get a car into this specific location,&#8221; but T&amp;W&#8217;s gonna handle that with transparency, security, and that a- that, that allows them to be sustainable year after<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">year<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> What I was thinking, and I appreciate that, &#8217;cause it&#8217;s not just always going for cheaper. This, there is a certain convenience with saying, &#8220;Hey, I have I have an approach that is sustainable.&#8221; What I&#8217;m talking about is rail is cleaner and greener than <span class=\"s2\">[00:45:00]<\/span> trucks. So I&#8217;m assuming certain companies are looking at rail for their supply chain and saying, &#8220;Is this a way for us to meet our sustainability targets?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Because every major, every big company, the Fortune 500, all of them have sustainability goals. And we&#8217;re getting cleaner with trucks every year every year. I just spoke to some guys about renewable natural gas engines. Even the regular diesel ones are <span class=\"s2\">[00:45:30]<\/span> getting cleaner and greener, but rail is cleaner and greener<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> And that&#8217;s sustainability, and yes, you&#8217;re right. And I would also mention too that it really kinda depends on the administration that&#8217;s in office on what&#8217;s important as far as sustainability goes, right? So you may see the current administration that is less focused on green items as compared to the previous administration and so forth. But, that&#8217;s another one of the services that we offer <span class=\"s2\">[00:46:00]<\/span> is we are, at all of our properties, we&#8217;re Operation Clean Sweep. And so what that means is these plastics manufacturers, they need to know that to, to be environmentally compliant, that those pellets aren&#8217;t getting on the ground. So we went through a process to become Operation Clean Sweep compliant that provides a framework of what happens when those cars come on our property. Whether or not it be end- showing that there&#8217;s a pellet leaking out of a <span class=\"s2\">[00:46:30]<\/span> car or pellets that have been found. So that&#8217;s another one of the things that we help customers meet that sustainability.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> What I was getting at is putting f- four, the equivalent of four truckloads into one car, and then a rail going across country uses less energy than trucks. So<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> one, one gallon per every 300 miles on a rail car. That&#8217;s the typical<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> And I&#8217;ll also say this, forget what the silly folks in Washington are doing. I know you have to visit them <span class=\"s2\">[00:47:00]<\/span> as part of your job, but regardless of who&#8217;s in office, the major Fortune 500 companies almost across the board say, &#8220;We value sustainability.&#8221; And so they&#8217;re gonna have their green goals. And c- and the reason they&#8217;re, they have it isn&#8217;t because of Washington.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">They have it because their customers say, &#8220;Hey, is this sustainable?&#8221; And by the way, w- if you go to the store today and you&#8217;re buying something and it says, &#8220;Hey, this is 100% recycled w- whatever,&#8221; and this one isn&#8217;t, you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ll pay an extra 20 <span class=\"s2\">[00:47:30]<\/span> cents. What do I care?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> You&#8217;re 100% right. It<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">matters.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> so all these major&#8211; By the way, I remember years ago when I was still in moving logistics rather than just talking about it, I was moving solar panels, and we were moving solar panels to all the Walmarts around the country.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And you go why does Walmart care about that?&#8221; Walmart has really dove into being sustainable. And people are gonna say yeah, it&#8217;s not sustainable. They have all these stores.&#8221; We&#8217;re going to those stores. <span class=\"s2\">[00:48:00]<\/span> But they&#8217;re doing the best they can. Their trucks, they have a lot of trucks, and they have, they&#8217;ve been one of the leaders in green transportation to the extent you can be green when you&#8217;re moving a truck.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So anyway, I know there&#8217;s been a lot of upgrades in the rail business, and I think, it&#8217;s the same with the transportation over-the-road stuff. We were w- I&#8217;m not saying it wasn&#8217;t like it was unprofessional, but it was more casual. I think there was a sense that &#8220;I&#8217;m <span class=\"s2\">[00:48:30]<\/span> p- no one&#8217;s gonna steal from me.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">No one&#8217;s gonna do this. No one&#8217;s gonna defraud me.&#8221; Now I think we, we know that we can be victimized by the bad people. I think we also realized during COVID the importance of supply chain and everything upgraded since then. So what do you see as the future in your business as and don&#8217;t just talk about class short lines, but also the class ones?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, I think what you&#8217;re seeing now as far as <span class=\"s2\">[00:49:00]<\/span> how, what the future looks like in rail is you&#8217;re seeing AI. Everybody talks about AI nowadays. You&#8217;re seeing that really creep into all of the railroads. And whether that be, most people when they think of AI, they think, &#8220;Oh ChatGPT.&#8221; That, that&#8217;s a small piece of it that I think is really helping different pieces of the rail business. But when I look at AI, I look at, how are these autonomous rail cars <span class=\"s2\">[00:49:30]<\/span> being, made today? There&#8217;s some companies out there that&#8230; I was in DC a couple weeks ago or about a month ago, and this company, Parallel Systems, has created this autonomous<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">car.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> those guys<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. So you have them, you have another customer GLID out of Texas that is getting into that market. And I say GLID because I can&#8217;t remember if they pronounce it glide or glid<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But A a great company out of Texas that <span class=\"s2\">[00:50:00]<\/span> is working towards that same same feature. Those are the kind of things that I think are really gonna change the landscape year or long term in our business<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> this idea of autonomous for rail because obviously it&#8217;s going to stay on the rail. So if you said that, that thing&#8217;s gonna run all night maybe it takes off time. Obviously a human driver has to stop and there&#8217;s safety standards required. But if you say that, that rail car moves across the country the same way all the <span class=\"s2\">[00:50:30]<\/span> time.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Now, autonomous trucks, we&#8217;re gonna get there, but it&#8217;s a little scarier because we&#8217;re driving on those roads. Nobody&#8217;s driving on the rail railroad that day.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Joe, when you also think about just the, what we&#8217;ve talked about some maintenance of the infrastructure. When you look at, 10 years ago, when temperature gets to a certain degree either high or low, people are out manually walking and riding to look at that infrastructure to see if they see any breaks, any cracks in the infrastructure is the <span class=\"s2\">[00:51:00]<\/span> gauge out what does that look like?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And so with today&#8217;s technology, now you have these autonomous track inspection tools.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Oh, that&#8217;s crazy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> So they&#8217;ll go out and do the work for you and be able to identify, okay, am I out of gauge? Is there a small crack somewhere? Is there&#8230; And it&#8217;s monitoring not only that track, but it can monitor rail cars. So it&#8217;s looking to say, &#8220;Hey I see this rail car here has <span class=\"s2\">[00:51:30]<\/span> a piece of material protruding off of it,&#8221; or, &#8220;I see this that is wrong with the internal pieces of the rail car.&#8221; So it, it&#8217;s gonna continue to make for a safer rail industry. W- when you look at, when you look at last year, 2025, we finished out the year as having the safest record across the entire rail industry in its existence, in 200 years. So we had&#8211; And so it&#8217;s only gonna continue to get better as we <span class=\"s2\">[00:52:00]<\/span> move to taking the human factor out of certain things. We&#8217;ll never replace people, but it will help<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yeah it&#8217;s When you talk about rail track, r- the railroad track inspection or the truck inspection, that is a job that is not good for a human. If you and I were res- responsible for walking a mile down a track and saying, &#8220;Yep, everything&#8217;s good,&#8221; we might be like, &#8220;Ah, this is my seventh mile today. I&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Yeah, it all looks good to <span class=\"s2\">[00:52:30]<\/span> me.&#8221; Much better to have a machine that, with sensors, go down that rail- railroad track. Anyway, I&#8217;m gonna wrap this bad boy up, then I want to get your final thoughts on the topic. I&#8217;m talking to my friend Joey Evans, and today&#8217;s topic is Short Lines, Big Impact: How Short Line Railroads Power America&#8217;s Supply Chain.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">I ask a lot of very basic questions of you today. I appreciate you hearing me out and answering my questions. The big railroads that we all know of the Class One, the <span class=\"s2\">[00:53:00]<\/span> BNSF, Norfolk Southern, many others that you mentioned, those go the long distance. You call those the kinda the expressways of of the rail business.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But there&#8217;s these other ones, the short lines, which would be Class Two and Class Three railroads. These are the ones that kinda are the connectors. So these might be five miles long, it might be 600 miles long, but a lot&#8211; what they&#8217;re serving is a lot of this, these commodities that are big, bulky stuff that it&#8217;s <span class=\"s2\">[00:53:30]<\/span> usually more cost advantageous to move this stuff via rail.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">A rail car is four times as big as a tr- a truck box. It&#8217;s moving chemicals, it&#8217;s moving plastics, it&#8217;s moving aggregates, agriculture stuff. And we talked about the role of the Class Two and the Class Three, the short lines. We talked about, when you have these rail- railroads, whether they&#8217;re the Class Ones, Class Twos, or Class Three, these are similar to a <span class=\"s2\">[00:54:00]<\/span> port in that it drives trade for a region.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So if you all of a sudden have a Class Two, Class Three that&#8217;s coming into an area that means you&#8217;re gonna be able to have certain types of businesses that you couldn&#8217;t have otherwise. And that&#8217;s why when you&#8217;re in an industrial park, sometimes you&#8217;ll go, &#8220;Why is there a railroad here?&#8221; There&#8217;s a railroad here because they weren&#8217;t gonna build that industrial park unless they got that railroad.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And because cer- certain stuff, it&#8217;s just&#8230; let&#8217;s face it, when you&#8217;re talking about agriculture, that&#8217;s a <span class=\"s2\">[00:54:30]<\/span> very difficult business. You can&#8217;t pay extra for your transportation, plain and simple.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Very thin margins<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yes. So a lot of economic development driven by the railroads. We talked about some supply chain lessons learned.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">I think you talked about scorecards and visibility tools. I don&#8217;t think we would&#8217;ve had that conversation five, seven years ago. The world has changed since then. We talked about sustainability. A lot of companies are looking for a way to save on environmental impact. This is <span class=\"s2\">[00:55:00]<\/span> one good way to do it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">You gotta have the volume, you gotta be the right fit. That&#8217;s why you gotta talk to the railroad people. I think you said it a few times, much more open to what makes sense. And if it doesn&#8217;t make sense, they&#8217;ll be quick to tell you, &#8220;No, we can&#8217;t help you.&#8221; They&#8217;re not gonna, they&#8217;re not gonna do your l- your final mile to delivering groceries, but there&#8217;s a lot of other good places they fit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Let&#8217;s see. What else did I miss here? I think that&#8217;s it. Anyway, put a big old bow on this, Joey Evans. Final thoughts on the topic.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> <span class=\"s2\">[00:55:30]<\/span> Yeah. What I would tell anybody that&#8217;s out there that&#8217;s looking to solve their supply chain challenges, T&amp;W Corporation, we&#8217;re&#8211; we focus, primarily on short lines and operating those short lines. We&#8217;re open to moving and working anywhere in the country. We just happen to be headquartered in the great state of Texas. But we&#8217;re here to solve challenges for you. So if you&#8217;ve got a problem that needs someone that&#8217;s really gonna offer that white glove service to you and is really gonna <span class=\"s2\">[00:56:00]<\/span> focus on safety first and foremost, and then at that point is gonna talk about how to drive your long-term success, whether it be through your typical freight haul or transloading or different ancillary services related to rail, we&#8217;re here to be your, we&#8217;re here to be your solutions provider.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">We&#8217;ll always put your focus first and foremost. We will make you to where it provides a scorecard and a baseline for you at your other locations as <span class=\"s2\">[00:56:30]<\/span> well. So you can find us at www.tnwcorporation.com. Uh, and myself and the other team members, we&#8217;re happy to help you solve any challenge you&#8217;ve got<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yep. Sounds good. Sounds good. So what I&#8217;ll do is I&#8217;ll make sure I put a link to your LinkedIn profile, link to your website, any other links you and your go-to-market team give me. If you guys get case studies or anything, we&#8217;ll put those in the show notes. And I&#8217;ll look for that one article I talked about, which was what&#8217;s the best way to move oil?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And I not that it was a <span class=\"s2\">[00:57:00]<\/span> big part of our conversation, but I think it&#8217;s interesting because there al- there&#8217;s alternatives and there&#8217;s a good fit. And I think over time we&#8217;re figuring out where stuff belongs. This is the nature of our supply chains becoming more and more efficient. 25, 30 years ago, you might say, &#8220;I&#8217;m picking that up in LA.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">I got a truck.&#8221; Now, a lot of times people say is it better for a truck or is it better for rail and pick it up in Chicago?&#8221; We&#8217;re figuring those things out and it&#8217;s it&#8217;s why we have <span class=\"s2\">[00:57:30]<\/span> the inexpensive products that we have. I know everyone&#8217;s saying everything&#8217;s too expensive. Our world has become very cheap compared to our grandparents and great-grandparents.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Sure. I would say, Joe the best way to move anything is T&amp;W Corporation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Thank you, Joe. It was my<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Oh, be-before I forget, what conference are you guys going to this year?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Yeah, so next week I&#8217;ll be at Railway Interchange in Omaha, Nebraska. It&#8217;s the largest railroad conference there is, <span class=\"s2\">[00:58:00]<\/span> about 4,000 attendees. I&#8211; you can always catch me at American Short Line Regional Railroad Association Railroad Day on the Hill, their annual conference, or any one of the Association of Rail Shipper conferences, and any other conference that you think I need to be at, don&#8217;t hesitate to reach out and I&#8217;ll join you there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Yeah. It was, you should definitely get over to Manifest. That&#8217;s the&#8211; I always call that the Super Bowl of supply chain. Everybody&#8217;s there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> All right, I&#8217;ll check it out<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> Thank you so much for taking the time, Joey.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> Thank you, Joe. I enjoyed<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><span class=\"s4\"> me too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Joey Evans:<\/b><\/span> <span class=\"s2\">[00:58:30]<\/span> Thank you so much<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>Joe Lynch:<\/b><\/span> And thank all of you for listening to my show. Your support&#8217;s very much appreciated. Until next time, onward and upward<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":251,"featured_media":10930,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1012,991,988],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-logistics","category-podcast","category-supply-chain"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/www.thelogisticsoflogistics.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/magic-thumbnail-1-1.png","author_info":{"display_name":"Nathalie 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