CSX Corporation

CSX is a transportation company committed to being a leader in railroad, inland water, and containerized distribution networks. To attract the human and financial resources necessary to achieve this leadership position, CSX will support our three major constituencies: For our customers, we will work as a partner to provide excellent service by meeting all agreed-upon commitments. For our employees, we will create a work environment that motivates and allows them to grow and develop and perform their jobs to the maximum of their capacity. For our shareholders, we will meet our goals to provide them with sustainable superior returns. CSX Corporation is a leading transportation-based holding company that operates one of the United States's leading rail systems. The company's rail system is the largest in the eastern United States and the third-largest in the country as a whole, trailing only those of Union Pacific Corp. and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. The system, run by the company's CSX Transportation Inc. unit, covers about 18,500 miles in 20 Southeastern, Eastern, and Midwest states and the Canadian province of Ontario. CSX also owns and operates the world's largest containership line, Sea-Land Service Inc.; the largest U.S. barge carrier, American Commercial Lines Inc.; the nation's only full-service intermodal transportation company, CSX Intermodal Inc.; and a leading provider of contract logistics services, including distribution, warehousing, assembly, and just-in-time delivery, Customized Transportation Inc. In addition, CSX manages extensive real estate development activities; operates several large resorts, including the Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia; and holds a majority stake in Yukon Pacific Corporation, a promoter of a pipeline to transport natural gas from Alaska's North Slope to Valdez. CSX has remained at the center of the continuing consolidation of the railroad industry, most recently entering into a mid-1997 agreement to acquire 42 percent of Conrail's lines, mainly located in the northeastern states. In placing continued, though not exclusive, reliance on rail traffic, the company is looking back to its distant origins. CSX's railroad, the major part of its business over the years, is the end result of a long series of consolidations involving three historic railroad systems: the Seaboard Coast Line, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which together span nearly the entire history of railroading in the United States. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) was chartered in February 1827 by a group of leading Baltimore businessmen with one of their number, Philip E. Thomas, as the first president. Its purpose was twofold: to challenge major canals, especially the Erie Canal, for trade to the west and to provide more efficient and cheaper freight and passenger service than was then available. In Baltimore's case this traffic passed over the National Road, which ran from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio River, with an eastward extension to Baltimore. The railroad's construction started on July 4, 1828, at a historic celebration presided over by Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. The B&O's planners intended to use horses for motive power, but Peter Cooper's first locomotive used on the line, the diminutive Tom Thumb , made its first successful run in 1830, ending the railroad's need for horsepower. Construction progress was slow, however, and the rail line from Baltimore to Wheeling wasn't completed until December 1852. A second western extension was completed to Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1857, with connections to local railroads providing service to Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio and to St. Louis, Missouri. The Ohio and West Virginia connections fostered a great increase in coal traffic from mid-western mines to the east. By 1860 revenues from coal were about one-third