Rail Factoids - 7: CSX

I often wondered about the name "CSX".  I wondered what this American railroad did and how it got its name.  A recent trawl of sources provided some useful information.

CSX Transportation is the name of one of the USA's largest railroads.  It is an entirely freight operation covering a large area of the eastern US with over 20,000 miles of routes within the boundary formed by Chicago, New York and Florida.

Map showing the area of the US covered by the CSX system.  Source: Wikipedia.

The company has its headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida.  It is one of the four largest class 1 railroads in the US.  It has:

• just under 30,000 employees;
• 4,072 locomotives;
• just over 80,000 freight cars;
• a route network of 21,000 miles including 3,800 miles of track rights;
• a yearly traffic of 3.9 million car loads
• 25% of its volume and a third of its revenue from coal.

CSX was formed in 1980 combining the Chessie System and the Seaboard System RR. In 1987 the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which included the former Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was absorbed by CSX. 

There's an excellent article about CSX and its recent developments in Trains Magazine for October 2011 and the CSX has a website here.