Norfolk Southern (NYSE: NSC) is reportedly getting ready to pull up stakes and move its corporate headquarters to Atlanta, a move a corporate relocation expert calls “an opportunity for them to recalibrate and refresh their brand.”
“They’ll be relocating to an exciting city like Atlanta,” John Boyd of The Boyd Companies said in an interview with FreightWaves. He cited the “skill set” of the people in Atlanta, where Norfolk Southern already has a little less than 2,000 employees in Atlanta’s Midtown area. A story in the Norfolk Virginian Pilot said the railroad had about 500 employees at its corporate headquarters in downtown Norfolk across two buildings.
In a recent fact sheet, NS listed about 4,700 employees in Georgia, though that would be on its rail system as well. The company operates about 1,700 miles of track in the state.
There’s another huge factor in the move: Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest in the world. A recent glance at the online flight board for Norfolk’s airport found the usual lineup of flights to major hubs: United to Houston, American to Chicago, Delta to Detroit, and so on. Want to go somewhere else? Change planes.
But moving to a city with an airport that has direct flights to just about everywhere is a “common denominator” in corporate headquarters moves, Boyd said.