TFI International had to close its Nashville, Tennessee, TForce Freight terminal for days due to snow, Chairman, President and CEO Alain Bédard said on a Q4 earnings call Feb. 9.

“Never seen — never heard of that before,” he said.

The weather made for a tough January for the Canadian freight transportation conglomerate, which faced the same challenges as its peers in navigating the severe weather, Bédard said.

“Are we going to do better in Q1 ‘24 than in Q1 ‘23? I would say yes,” he said. “Will that be better by a lot? Probably not. Because January has been quite difficult for us.”

Ice storms across the country disrupted XPO’s operations for about seven to 10 days in the middle of January, Chief Strategy Officer Ali Faghri said in an interview.

He declined to provide specifics on the number of terminals closed by the storms.

“But I think what’s good is that we saw those volume trends really start to recover later in the month and into February,” Faghri said.

The carrier’s overall tonnage decreased by 1% in January, while its shipment count improved 1.4%, the chief strategy officer said. 

“Clearly, January would have been a lot better if it hadn't been for those for those weather events,” he said. “But it's always hard to quantify exactly how much that impacted volumes in the market.”

While Runser pointed out the jump in service center closures due to the storms, he also noted that the carrier prepares for a certain level of winter weather disruption each year. 

Over the past decade, ABF Freight has averaged about 174 closures in Q1, he said. 

“We’re already at about 75% of that and we're just getting into February,” Runser said.

Runser said he was proud of ABF Freight’s workforce, “that we fully recovered, network’s back on cycle.”

“We feel good,” Runser said. “We're positioned well.”

Saia had dozens of terminals affected by snow for six or seven days in January, Saia EVP and CFO Doug Col said during a Q4 earnings call Friday.

“We always kid about it being an outdoor sport, and we got quite a bit of weather in January,” he said. “It will be hard to give any kind of guide. I mean, it's sunny here to start February. But in some years, February has been the worst weather month for us. We'll see how that unfolds.”

March is the most important month in Q1 for the LTL industry, and it could give a better indication about any potential improvements in the underlying freight economy, the CFO said. 

“That's a seasonally stronger period for us,” Col said. “So we'll see what things look like in March.”

The new year got off to a slow start for Hub Group, COO Bill Alexander said during the company’s Q4 earnings call on Feb. 1. He added “weather events impacted January volume.” 

The company’s intermodal segment was impacted by weather, Alexander said, but the railroads were “nimble and quicker to respond to disruption.”

The railroads' ability to keep trains running in bad weather builds a strong case to convert more shippers to intermodal, according to President and CEO Phil Yeager. 

“I think we’re using the most recent winter weather disruption as a rebound in service,” Yeager said during the call.

Harsh winter weather in January had some impact on Schneider National, President and CEO Mark Rourke said during the company’s Q4 earnings call on Feb. 1.

“We had some adverse weather impacts, particularly in comparison to the last couple of years,” Rourke told analysts. 

Though Rourke noted weather won’t influence the weak near-term freight outlook, he remains optimistic about the coming months.

“We do think it will continue to improve throughout the year and be a bit more robust in the second half,” he said. 

Old Dominion Freight Line doesn’t view even last month’s extreme storms as a one-time event, EVP and CFO Adam Satterfield said during a Q4 earnings call.

“Winter weather comes every year, and it's something that we contend with and is generally in our averages,” Satterfield said.

He acknowledged that Old Dominion dealt with the same weather issues as the rest of the industry, then noted that the carrier “made up for a little bit of lost ground with that last week.”

The storms could bring average shipments per day for the quarter below Old Dominion’s five-year average sequential 0.3% increase, the CFO said.

“We'll see where we end up,” Satterfield said. “But I feel like that certainly that number has been impacted a little bit. ... But how much will we get back in February, where we see a traditional bump? And then March will continue to be the important month.”

Webb Estes, president and COO of his family’s company, told Trucking Dive in an interview that LTL carriers like Estes Express Lines aren’t feeling the squeeze they would be because of Yellow Corp.’s bankruptcy tightening capacity.

“We're doing well,” Estes said, describing the privately held carrier’s performance. “We're up.”

Then, the company president paused to share a thought clearly weighing on his — and other trucking executives’ — mind. 

“Can I say my goal is to have less weather in 2024?” he mused. “I'm not doing well at that right now.”

Winter weather is such a perennial disruptor to key performance indicators, Estes said, that “I normally don't even use our January and February numbers.”

“They’re so squirrely,” he said.

The weather affected Knight-Swift’s January truckload productivity and shuttered LTL terminals, “particularly given our concentration through the Southeast,” President and CEO David Jackson said on a Q4 earnings call.

“As we look into January thus far, the last two weeks have been pretty severely impacted by weather,” Jackson said.

The company listed weather among the factors giving it an unusual degree of uncertainty and prompting it to issue two quarters of forward visibility, instead of its previous full-year guidance.

On the call with analysts, Knight-Swift executive declined to quantify two weeks' worth of weather effects on a quarter's earnings per share.

“But certainly, it has tempered what we thought we would typically earn into January,” he said.