Coronado California USA - Canadian Pacific CEO Keith Creel spoke for nearly an hour Monday as the keynote speaker at the NRC Conference.
 
In addition to his remarks on mergers and Precision Scheduled Railroading, he also touched on a number of other topics.
 
Creel said that while railroading might eventually see significant savings through adoption of one-man operating crews, or autonomous trains, "but I've got some shareholders that aren't going to wait for that day to come. So we've got to continue to innovate and do better with what we have today."
 
One way CP is doing that, he said, is through increasing use of predictive analytics, to address problems before they occur.
 
"I think of something like a hot bearing," he said.
 
"We've created some algorithms that we've got a patent on that allow us to set cars out. It has dropped our experience of burnt journals down 60, 70 percent. And it's 40 or 50 percent better than the industry. And we're just beginning to scratch the surface. What does big data mean? It means being able to take history and predicting the future, through analyzing data. So it's an area where we continue to innovate."
 
He addressed CP's situation as a company that has to deal with investors in Canada, trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange, as well as U.S. investors dealing on Wall Street.
 
"The Canadian investor, the TSX exchange, typically the shareholders, they're more long-term focused," Creel says.
 
"They're more about sustained growth, more about reasonable shareholder return. They're all about sustainability. You're in it for the long haul. Versus Wall Street, the pro is that Wall Street pushes you, and as a leader in a high-performance environment, I like to be pushed. It doesn't bother me. But sometimes, the demographic of your investor can be a little more short-term focused. And this is a long-term business."
 
While saying his railroad has been the safest railroad in North America when measured by train accidents, he said, "It's hard for me to boast about safety when we haven't realized the same success when it comes to our personal injuries. We went through a very challenging, tragic accident in February 2019. We lost three employees, and then we lost another employee in December. When you have those kinds of things happened as a leader, I take that as my responsibility. You have to go sit with the family the next day, and explain the whys. And to talk through the pain and the suffering it causes, not only for those families, but you see it across the entire railway. It's not that we're not doing something and making a difference. It's that we're not doing enough. It's something that in 2020, I expect our team to move the needle on."
 
He said he does not know what his own future looks like beyond his commitment to CP through 2022.
 
"In all honesty, I haven't thought beyond it," he says.
 
David Lassen.