David R. Goode

David R. Goode
Born	1941-01-13January 13, 1941 (age 85) Vinton, Virginia, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Duke University (AB, 1962) Harvard Law School (JD, 1965) Harvard Business School (Advanced Management Program)
Occupation	Business executive, lawyer
Company	Norfolk Southern Corporation
Title	Former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Norfolk Southern Corporation
Spouse	Susan Skiles (m. 1963)
Children	2

David R. Goode (born January 13, 1941) is an American business executive and lawyer who was chairman, president and chief executive officer of the Norfolk Southern Corporation, the Virginia-based holding company of the Norfolk Southern Railway, from 1992 to 2005. He remained chairman until February 1, 2006, and left the company's board in May 2006.

Goode spent his whole career with Norfolk Southern and one of the two railroads that merged to form it. He joined the Norfolk and Western Railway as a tax attorney in 1965, straight out of Harvard Law School, and worked in its tax department for more than 20 years. In 1991 he moved into general management, and within about a year he went from executive vice president of administration to president and then chief executive. He was in charge during the 1996 to 1997 contest with CSX Corporation for control of Conrail. Norfolk Southern answered CSX's agreed merger with Conrail with a higher all-cash bid. The two railroads then agreed to split Conrail, with Norfolk Southern taking 58 percent and CSX 42 percent. Norfolk Southern's share of the purchase cost $5.8 billion.

The trade journal Railway Age named Goode its Railroader of the Year for 1998 and again for 2005. He was only the fourth person to receive that award twice. In 2005 Norfolk Southern named its midtown Atlanta office building after him. Outside the railroad, he sat on the boards of Caterpillar Inc., Texas Instruments, Georgia-Pacific and Delta Air Lines. He served on the Delta board from 1999 to 2016.

Railroad enthusiasts also know Goode as the executive who ended Norfolk Southern's steam excursion program in 1994. In a 2023 interview he called the decision "the great albatross around my neck". He said it was his own decision, taken for reasons of cost, insurance and crowd safety, and he still believed it was right. The National Railroad Hall of Fame inducted him at a ceremony in Roanoke, Virginia, on March 12, 2026.

Early life and education

Goode was born on January 13, 1941, in Vinton, Virginia, a town just outside Roanoke. He grew up on a hillside above the Roanoke River, near the edge of Bedford County. The line of the old Virginian Railway ran along the river below, and he later recalled that his first contact with railroads was "in the cradle, hearing the coal trains on their way to Lambert's Point". The town was on the Norfolk and Western main line, and many customers of his father's store worked in the railroad's East End Shops in Roanoke, where the company built its steam locomotives.

In the 2023 interview Goode said his father's family came from the West Virginia coalfields, where his grandfather was a miner. During the Depression his father left the mines for Roanoke, took a job with Sears, Roebuck, studied at night, and used the benefits of the Sears profit-sharing plan to buy a small store of his own. In the same interview Goode said his mother was a schoolteacher from Bedford County, a farmer's daughter and the first in her family to attend college. Her first post was in a one-room schoolhouse. A 2006 Gale profile gives a somewhat different account: it says his father later became a real estate broker and that Goode got his first business experience keeping the books for the family's store.

The Gale profile also says Goode was class valedictorian at high school and was voted most likely to succeed. He had a scholarship to Washington and Lee but chose Duke University after visiting its campus. He started at Duke as an English major. By his own account, his father's business ran into debt and failed before Goode went to college, so he arrived at Duke "as a broke kid". After his sophomore year his father urged him to study something more practical, and he switched to accounting, finishing with what he called "in effect, a double major". At Duke he worked as advertising manager and then business manager of the student newspaper, The Chronicle. He spent three summers as a seasonal park ranger with the United States Forest Service. He also met Susan Skiles, a student one year behind him. He graduated from Duke with an AB in 1962.

Goode then went to Harvard Law School. He later said that, with the Vietnam War under way, staying in school made sense, and that he had nearly applied to Harvard as an undergraduate but "lost my nerve". He married Susan Skiles on June 22, 1963, after she graduated from Duke, and she worked in Cambridge while he finished his studies. He received his JD in 1965. Much later, in 1990, Norfolk Southern sent him to the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School while it was preparing him for senior management.

Career

Norfolk and Western Railway (1965 to 1982)

Goode said he ended up at the railroad by chance. He had planned to begin his career as a tax lawyer in New York or Washington. In his last year at Harvard he interviewed with Linwood Holton, a Roanoke lawyer who later became governor of Virginia, and received a job offer from him. Holton then suggested he meet the Harvard Law graduates in the Norfolk and Western's senior management. On a Saturday visit to the railroad, the head of its law department, Jack Fishwick, showed him the papers for the Dereco transaction, a holding-company arrangement through which the Norfolk and Western took control of the Delaware and Hudson and Erie Lackawanna railroads. Goode was then introduced to Robert Claytor and offered a job. He said the railroad needed a tax lawyer because it had just absorbed the Nickel Plate, the Wabash and several smaller lines, and that much of his early work took him to St. Louis and Cleveland.

He joined the Norfolk and Western as a tax attorney in 1965. He became assistant general tax attorney in 1967, general tax attorney in 1968, and director of taxation in 1971, a post he held until 1981. Goode said that during the railroad industry's financial troubles of the early 1970s his work moved beyond tax law to "looking for ways to hold on, find cash", and he spent more and more time in Washington as Congress passed legislation to support the railroads. He also took part in early merger talks between the Norfolk and Western and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. The two sides reached a plan, but the collapse of the Penn Central made it impossible to carry out.

Norfolk Southern tax department (1982 to 1991)

The Norfolk and Western and the Southern Railway merged in 1982 to form the Norfolk Southern Corporation. Goode became the new company's assistant vice president of taxation in 1982 and vice president of taxation in 1985. He had worked on the tax and corporate structure of the merger. He also carried messages between the two railroads' human resources chiefs, who stayed in separate offices in Washington and Roanoke until the merger closed, while they combined the companies' compensation and benefit plans.

Goode later said he was "bitterly disappointed" when the merged company put its headquarters in Norfolk and Claytor, its first chief executive, did not give him the post he had wanted, because a more senior Southern Railway executive was in line for it. He received an offer from Union Pacific for a tax job in New York at higher pay, but turned it down after talking it over with his wife. He stayed in Roanoke as head of the tax department, which he described as being Claytor's "eyes and ears" in the city after the headquarters moved. His position in Roanoke left him time for civic work. He became one of the first members from outside New York on the board of the Business Committee for the Arts, the organisation founded by David Rockefeller, and later served for a couple of years as its president.

Executive vice president and president (1991 to 1992)

In the late 1980s Arnold McKinnon, Claytor's successor as chief executive, told the board that his own five years as CEO had been too short. He suggested choosing a successor who could serve longer, and the board began looking at internal and external candidates. Goode said he was one of those considered, and that McKinnon told him he had "a shot" at the job but would have to move to Norfolk. Goode moved there the following Monday. After he completed the Harvard Advanced Management Program, Norfolk Southern named him executive vice president of administration in 1991. The job covered information technology, human resources and real estate.

Later in 1991 he was made president of Norfolk Southern. Norfolk Southern's 1995 annual report says he was president from October 1991 to September 1992. Goode said the appointment surprised Wall Street. He recalled a Wall Street Journal report saying he had "toiled in obscurity in Roanoke for many years", and said that his former colleagues in the Roanoke tax department responded by hanging an "Obscurity" sign over their door. As president, he had the heads of operations and marketing, Henry Watts and Paul Rudder, reporting to him.

Chairman, president and chief executive officer (1992 to 2005)

Goode became chairman, president and chief executive officer of Norfolk Southern in September 1992, and joined its board the same year. He said he inherited a well-run, financially strong railroad, but that the export coal market soon collapsed. The company had planned a large new export coal facility near Norfolk, and environmental and neighbourhood objections had delayed it. He later called those delays "an angel on our shoulder", because the company had not yet spent the money when the market fell.

The drop in coal revenue, he said, pushed management to plan for a time when coal would no longer carry the railroad. The strategy that came out of that review rested on building up intermodal traffic and the automotive business, and on reaching the populous Northeast. Norfolk Southern worked to attract the new automobile plants that foreign manufacturers were building in the Southeast. Its 1999 annual report credits new traffic from the Toyota plants at Princeton, Indiana, and Georgetown, Kentucky, and the Mercedes-Benz plant at Vance, Alabama, along with business through Ford's vehicle mixing centers. In 1993 Conrail became a partner in Norfolk Southern's Triple Crown Services, which used trailers that could run on both rail and road. In 1995 the two railroads launched a north to south double-stack service.

Railway Age described Goode's strategy as having four parts: higher-quality, higher-value service; pricing that reflected that value; more traffic; and greater efficiency across all operations. The 1996 to 1997 contest for Conrail, its integration in 1999, the cost-cutting that followed, and the recovery of the early 2000s are described in later sections.

In October 2004 Charles W. Moorman became president, and Goode remained chairman and chief executive. In February 2005 the Virginia General Assembly passed a joint resolution congratulating Goode on his second Railroader of the Year award. The resolution noted Railway Age's description of Norfolk Southern as the "best-performing of the U.S. Class 1's" and the company's 15 consecutive E. H. Harriman gold safety awards.

Retirement and succession (2005 to 2006)

Goode retired as chief executive on November 1, 2005, and Moorman succeeded him in addition to remaining president. Goode stayed on as chairman until February 1, 2006, when Moorman took that title as well. At the time, Goode said, "Wick Moorman and his team will guide us to even higher levels of safety and service." He did not stand for re-election as a director, and his board term ended at the 2006 annual meeting.

On January 24, 2006, the board approved a retirement agreement under which Goode would consult for Norfolk Southern for five years from March 1, 2006. The consulting covered the handover to his successor, strategic acquisitions and disposals, capital raising and major financings, compensation, business strategy, and public appearances on the company's behalf. He agreed not to compete with the company or to solicit its employees or customers for five years, and he waived his change-in-control agreement. In return his pension was calculated on his three highest-paid years rather than five.

Goode later said that he had planned to retire at 62 but stayed on because the company was "in the middle of the dumps" after the Conrail integration. He said the company had no rule requiring retirement at 65, only a tradition, and that he chose to step aside at 65 because "in corporate leadership, you need to step aside at the right time". He said he decided against staying on as executive chairman or as a director because he had "been CEO for too long", and that leaving was "terribly hard".

Leadership and management style

Goode described his approach to leadership as finding "the very best people at their jobs as you could find, preferably people that are better than you are, and give them the ability and what they need to do it and let them run". He said this had loosened the hierarchical, "military" culture inherited from the Norfolk and Western and the Southern Railway. The Gale profile describes him as "normally noted for his courtly manner and gentility". It also quotes Railway Age calling him "a man who says what he means and means what he says".

He gave several examples of his methods. When he took over information technology as executive vice president, he made engineers pay a dollar into a charity pot every time they used an acronym in meetings with him. He said he collected about $12 at the first meeting. Early in his time as chief executive, he asked a high-school acquaintance working in the Roanoke freight car shops how the work could be done better. The man brought him a list of simple changes, which Goode said were mostly carried out after negotiation over union rules. During the service breakdown that followed the Conrail split in 1999, he flew to Cincinnati and sat in a crew break room drinking coffee until conductors and engineers told him how to clear the congestion. He then called his operating executive, Tony Ingram, to come back and hear them.

Goode treated safety as central to the operating culture. He set a goal of improving the operating ratio by one percentage point a year, and said that chief operating officer Stephen Tobias "lived and died the safety program". In his view, safety discipline and efficient operation were "very compatible". During the stock's slump after the Conrail integration, he attended Tobias's 7 a.m. operating meetings, reported to the board frequently, and offered to step down if the directors wanted new leadership. He said the board declined.

Major deals and strategic decisions

Conrail

Norfolk Southern had wanted access to the Northeast for decades. Goode traced the aim back to the Dereco arrangement of the 1960s and to the company's unsuccessful attempt to buy Conrail from the federal government in the 1980s. He said he told Conrail chairman James Hagen at a meeting in Philadelphia that Norfolk Southern would now pay Conrail's asking price. Hagen replied that it was too late, because he had already promised the chairmanship to David LeVan. Goode said the Norfolk Southern board considered a public "bear hug" offer at that point but decided against making a hostile bid.

In mid-October 1996, John Snow, the chief executive of CSX, telephoned Goode to say that CSX and Conrail had agreed to merge. Goode said that he took the call in his car on Hampton Boulevard in Norfolk, and that he immediately called his team and the board together and decided that "this was not going to happen". He told Fortune that his first concern "was what to say to the world. We decided to make a strongly worded response indicating Norfolk Southern planned to take action and wouldn't rule out any options." After Snow offered what Goode called "a nickel and a dime" in concessions, the Norfolk Southern board met in New York and decided to make a higher, all-cash counteroffer. CSX's offer was part stock and part cash.

Conrail's board rejected the Norfolk Southern offer. Goode then campaigned among Conrail shareholders, who rejected the proposed CSX merger on January 17, 1997. Goode recalled walking through a picket line of Conrail employees to the shareholder meeting at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, shaking hands with anyone who would shake his, instead of using the back entrance his security staff had arranged. About a month after the vote, he wrote to Snow and LeVan proposing that Conrail be divided roughly equally between the two railroads. By early April 1997 the companies had agreed a plan. Goode said that a final increase in Norfolk Southern's all-cash offer, published on a Monday morning against CSX's objections, was "what finally tipped the balance".

Norfolk Southern and CSX completed the purchase of tendered Conrail shares on May 23, 1997. On June 2, 1997, the remaining Conrail shares were converted into the right to receive $115 a share in cash. Norfolk Southern's share of the cost, including fees, was $5.8 billion, and it received a 58 percent economic and 50 percent voting interest in the company that owned Conrail. The three companies signed an agreement on June 10, 1997, dividing Conrail's routes and assets. The Surface Transportation Board approved the division despite objections from some smaller railroads, shippers and rail unions. Norfolk Southern received about 6,000 Conrail route miles and CSX about 3,600. Roughly 1,000 miles in northern New Jersey, the Philadelphia area and Detroit became Shared Assets Areas operated for both railroads.

Goode said that Norfolk Southern considered combining with a western railroad instead, and believed a deal with Burlington Northern Santa Fe was possible. He said the board concluded that the company first needed the Northeast "to complete the Norfolk Southern system before we did anything in a transcontinental way", while accepting that "reasonable people may argue" over the choice. Looking back in 2023, he said both railroads had "lost a lot of money by not having been able to get this done five years ago", but that the outcome had given the East two competing systems and had "worked out well financially" for both companies.

Integration of Conrail (1999)

Norfolk Southern Railway began operating its portion of Conrail, which became its Northern Region, on June 1, 1999. On that date its route miles and its railroad workforce each grew by about 50 percent. The company's 1999 annual report says that difficulties in absorbing the Northern Region caused "system congestion, an increase in cars on line, increased terminal dwell time and reduced system velocity", raised labour and equipment costs, and drove away some traffic. Goode later said that the company had studied Union Pacific's troubled merger with Southern Pacific closely, but that "there is a law of big merger transactions and that is that something is always going to happen". He said, "we made mistakes and misjudgments", but added that the company "recovered pretty darn well".

North American Van Lines

Norfolk Southern sold its trucking subsidiary, North American Van Lines, completing the sale on March 28, 1998. Goode said that the company had found "less synergy than we thought there was" and that the money in trucking was made in ways the railroad did not want to pursue. He said, however, that it kept the trucking company's technology and some of its staff, and used what it had learned in building Triple Crown and the intermodal business.

Meridian Speedway

Goode also described the origins of the Meridian Speedway, a Kansas City Southern line that Norfolk Southern used as a route to the West for intermodal traffic. He said earlier talks about acquiring Kansas City Southern "nearly came to fruition, but didn't", because that company did not want to sell. Later, he and Kansas City Southern chief executive Michael Haverty shook hands on a deal while riding a train over the line. Goode said the line "needed some work" and that Kansas City Southern needed money for it, which Norfolk Southern had. He called the corridor "a pivotal piece" of rail history.

End of the steam excursion program

Norfolk Southern had run steam excursions since 1982 under an agreement with the city of Roanoke, using the restored Norfolk and Western Class J No. 611, among other locomotives. In 1994 the railroad scheduled 50 excursions between April and November, worked in large part by volunteers. On October 28, 1994, Norfolk Southern announced that it would end the program after that season, with the last trip on November 13. Goode said in a statement: "As much as we love the history and tradition that attach to steam excursions, steam operations have become incompatible with our total commitment to customer service. We can no longer justify the program in terms of the physical, financial and human resources that it demands." The decision drew a letter of protest from the mayor of Roanoke, David Bowers. Bowers said he was disappointed that the city had not been consulted, because Roanoke was building its tourism around the Virginia Museum of Transportation.

In 2023 Goode said the cost came at a time when the company needed to invest in growth, that none of the organisations wanting to run excursions could buy insurance, and that he worried about the safety of the crowds at trackside. He said it was "my decision", rejecting a story that the operating department had forced it on him, and that "it was absolutely the right decision". He also disputed a widely repeated quotation, attributed to him when he rode No. 611 from Charlotte back to Roanoke after its restoration, that ending the program had been a mistake. He said his actual words were that it was "a public relations mistake".

Financial and market performance

In Goode's first full year as chief executive, 1992, Norfolk Southern reported railway operating revenues of $3.78 billion, net income of $557.7 million, and an average of 30,135 employees. In 1995 the figures were $4.01 billion in railway revenues, $712.7 million in net income, and 26,944 employees. Railway operating revenues were $4.2 billion in both 1997 and 1998 and rose to $5.2 billion in 1999, the first year that included Conrail operations. The average workforce rose from 24,300 in 1998 to 31,166 in 1999.

Net income was $239 million in 1999 and fell to $172 million in 2000. The Gale profile attributes the fall to a slowing economy, a weak coal market and higher diesel fuel prices. Goode responded with cost cuts that included layoffs of nearly 3,700 workers in 2000 and between 1,000 and 2,000 more in 2001. According to the company's five-year review, railway operating revenues then rose from $6.17 billion in 2001 to $6.27 billion in 2002, $6.47 billion in 2003, $7.31 billion in 2004 and $8.53 billion in 2005. Net income rose from $375 million in 2001 to $460 million in 2002, $535 million in 2003, $923 million in 2004 and $1.28 billion in 2005. Diluted earnings per share went from $0.97 in 2001 to $3.11 in 2005, and the annual dividend from $0.24 to $0.48 a share. The average workforce was 30,894 in 2001 and 30,294 in 2005. In December 2003 Goode announced a 2004 capital budget of $810 million, including $517 million for roadway projects and $258 million for equipment.

Goode's pay was disclosed in Norfolk Southern's proxy statements. His base salary was $1,000,000 in each of 2003, 2004 and 2005. He received annual bonuses of $1,672,000 for 2003 and $2,000,000 for each of 2004 and 2005. His restricted stock awards were valued at $3,142,400 for 2003, $3,568,000 for 2004 and $3,746,600 for 2005. Long-term incentive plan payouts were $1,458,605 for 2003, $2,740,788 for 2004 and $5,772,840 for 2005. The 2005 proxy says that the independent directors set his salary between the 25th and 50th percentiles for chief executives of comparable US companies, and that he received no salary increase for 2004.

Board memberships and outside roles

Goode was a director of Caterpillar from 1993 to 2013 and of Texas Instruments from 1996 to 2011. He was also a director of Georgia-Pacific while serving as Norfolk Southern's chief executive. He joined the board of Delta Air Lines on April 22, 1999. By 2015 he sat on its finance committee and its personnel and compensation committee. Shareholders re-elected him at Delta's annual meeting in June 2015. He was not among the nominees for the 2016 annual meeting. Goode said that Delta's chief executive, Gerald Grinstein, had recruited him by telling him that serving on an airline board would show him "how easy it has been to be CEO of a railroad".

The Gale profile also lists the following roles: director of the Association of American Railroads and of Aeroquip-Vickers; member of the Business Council, the Business Roundtable, the Coal Industry Advisory Board, the National Freight Transportation Association, the National Grain Car Council, the Virginia Business Council and the business advisory committee of Northwestern University's Transportation Center; and trustee or director of the Business Committee for the Arts, the General Douglas MacArthur Memorial Foundation, Hollins College and the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges. In 2023 Goode said he had been head of the Association of American Railroads "more than anybody's ever been, I believe".

After retiring, Goode became an investor in Optical Cable Corporation, a Roanoke manufacturer. In October 2018 the company disclosed that he had bought its shares. Its chairman, Neil Wilkin, told shareholders that the company knew Goode through his Roanoke roots. The company's proxy statements for 2024 and 2025 list him as holding 123,651 shares, or 1.5 percent of the class in the 2025 filing, and describe him as "a strategic financial investor".

Since retiring, Goode has acted as an informal adviser to later Norfolk Southern leadership. At his 2026 Hall of Fame induction, chief executive Mark George told him, "David, having you as counsel has meant a great deal to me", and described him as "a trusted voice" while the railroad pursued a merger with Union Pacific.

Personal life

Goode married Susan Skiles, a fellow Duke student from Wilmington, Delaware, on June 22, 1963. They have two children. The family lived in Roanoke for about 25 years. There Susan Goode chaired the Roanoke Planning Commission and was president of Mill Mountain Theatre. Goode said she had at first been unenthusiastic about moving to his hometown but "fell in love with the Roanoke Valley". When he was offered his chance at the top job, he said, her reply was "Who do you think you're kidding? When do we leave?" When Goode moved to Norfolk to compete for the chief executive post, their daughter was in fourth grade. He still lived in the same house when he gave his 2023 interview.

Goode collects railroad photography. He knew the photographer O. Winston Link late in Link's life, and Norfolk Southern helped bring Link's archive to the restored Roanoke passenger station, which now houses the O. Winston Link Museum. He said in 2023 that his collection of Link's work had recently been given to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk. He has said he hoped retirement would let him "work on my golf game" and that this "hasn't worked out at all". He has remained friendly with Snow despite the Conrail contest, saying they "could go out tomorrow and play a nice round of golf together".

On October 9, 2025, Goode and his wife hosted a reunion in Virginia Beach of more than 100 Norfolk Southern alumni and friends from his time as chief executive.

Recognition

• 1997: John T. McCullough Logistics Executive of the Year Award, National Industrial Transportation League and Distribution magazine
• 1998: Railroader of the Year, Railway Age
• 1999: Virginian of the Year, Virginia Press Association
• 2005: Railroader of the Year, Railway Age. He was the 42nd recipient of the award and the fourth person to win it twice. The Virginia General Assembly commended him for the award in House Joint Resolution No. 930.
• 2005: Norfolk Southern named its 12-storey office building at 1200 Peachtree Street in midtown Atlanta the David R. Goode Building on September 27, 2005. About 1,200 employees worked there at the time.
• 2026: Inducted into the National Railroad Hall of Fame, March 12, 2026

See also

• Norfolk Southern Corporation
• Charles W. Moorman
• John W. Snow
• Conrail
• CSX Corporation

External links

• Norfolk Southern Corporation official website
• National Railroad Hall of Fame profile and oral history interview