Excerpts from "How to treat your biggest customer" article in Railway Age magazine, page 30, March 2002.

"Right now, the railroads are doing as well as they say they are," says United Parcel Service spokesman Norman Black. "They are tremendously important partners, and have been for a long time. If a customer specifies ground service, and that package is going long distance-anything more than 500 to 700 miles-rail is how we prefer to move it."

Those encouraging words compiling from a company that does $750 million in business with Class I's annually. UPS is the railroad's single biggest customer, and you don't want to keep the man in the big brown truck waiting.

What UPS needs from the railroads is, in a nutshell, on time, every time. "The most important thing," says Black, "is that they stick to whatever timetable they give us. We generally require our trailers and containers to arrive at the terminal at or before 6:00pm, and we construct a complicated hub and spoke movement that's based on train arrival. That drives schedules with sorters at our package centers. There could be dozens, hundred, even thousands of people waiting for a delivery, depending upon the size of the shipment. Right now, we are extremely pleased with the railroads' service commitment and performance."...

What else would UPS like to see? "We're always going to be pushing for faster transit times," says Black. We're also looking for additional competition on price and service in some corridors, particularly on the East coast, where there were promises of greater competition."...