On Oct. 22, Norfolk Southern President & CEO Mark George joined CNBC’s Closing Bell: Overtime to discuss the company’s strong third-quarter results, outlook for the remainder of 2024, and the leadership team’s focus on operational excellence.

Here are key takeaways from George’s interview:

Service Quality Attracts Freight Growth

“Really good service begets volume… What happened here in the last six months is we’ve finally got our service back up to excellent levels – not just acceptable but, really, excellent levels – and it’s had the effect of attracting freight back onto the railroad because we have such a good value proposition for our customers.”

Achieving Operational Excellence

“We have got to focus on operational excellence… It's all about establishing standard processes based on best practices. And when you have issues with standard processes or you have a breakdown somewhere, you do relentless root cause analysis to identify it and put it back into your standard processes so that the mistakes don't repeat themselves.”

“On top of that, we're going to work on our culture, really trying to build a speak-up culture and a two-way communication channel where our communications matter from leadership down but, honestly, I value tremendously the communication coming up from the field because that's where a lot of the great ideas originate. We need to create an atmosphere where people feel comfortable bringing up their ideas and, also, their concerns.”

Resiliency and Outlook for Q4 and Beyond

“What I’m really excited about and really proud of is how our network responded after Hurricane Helene... It was remarkable that we got all of our core routes reopened within 72 hours. That’s the definition of resiliency.”

“I’m really confident that we’re going to have this momentum going forward. We’ve got the right recipe and the right team carrying it out, so it gives me a lot of optimism as we go into Q4 and then we go into 2025 that, even if the market is weak from a demand perspective, we have recapture opportunities from a share perspective that will allow us to grow.”

To read more about Norfolk Southern’s Q3 earnings, visit AP, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Bloomberg.