Norfolk Southern’s Ed Elkins becomes 2025 chair of the Georgia Chamber

For the first time in its 110-year history, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce has an executive of a major railroad as its chair.

Ed Elkins, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Norfolk Southern Corp., became chair of the Georgia Chamber at its Eggs & Issues breakfast on Jan. 14. On everyone’s chair at the breakfast was a fact sheet about Norfolk Southern and Georgia. The railroad operates on 1,706 miles of track in Georgia, and it has 4,069 employees serving 1,263 unique customers across the state.

“It is a great opportunity for us and a great opportunity for our customers,” Elkins said of his role as chair. “We really want a thriving business community across the state.”

In 2022, Elkins and his family moved to a home in Buckhead from Virginia, where he had grown up and spent his entire career, after Norfolk Southern consolidated the company’s headquarters here and built a new office complex in Midtown. 

“We wanted to be part of Georgia when we moved here,” Elkins said, explaining why he got involved with the Georgia Chamber. “We didn’t want to be visitors.”

Elkins has quickly learned to drink the Georgia Kool-Aid.

“From a business perspective, I continue to be really surprised with how good Georgia is compared to other places,” Elkins said. “We cover 22 states — mainly east of the Mississippi. Every state out there is trying to earn the next opportunity. Georgia has the ability of taking what the business community needs and unleashing the power of free enterprise.”

During the Eggs & Issues breakfast, every business and political leader boasted about Georgia being named the best state for business for the 11th year in a row by Area Development magazine.

The Georgia Chamber wants to make sure the state keeps that designation. 

That’s one of the reasons it developed “Georgia 2025,” a 25-year strategic plan to align every Chamber activity around five prosperity pillars: talent and workforce preparedness, energy and infrastructure, innovation and entrepreneurship, regional prosperity and healthy communities and competitiveness and economic development.

“Our 25-year plan will ensure Georgia remains a destination for investment, creators and talent so we can power continued GDP [gross domestic product] growth,” said Pedro Cherry, 2024 Georgia Chamber chair who serves as president of Atlanta Gas Light, one of the founding corporate members of the state chamber in 1915.

Cherry said he gained greater insight into how Georgia works in his year as chair.

‘I’ve seen firsthand the power of collaboration, working across partisan lines, forging partnerships between leaders like Gov. [Brian] Kemp, small business owners and Fortune 500 companies,” Cherry said. “It’s this unique recipe, this secret sauce, the Georgia Way that keeps our economy growing and prospering.”

Chris Clark, Georgia Chamber’s president and CEO since 2010, said the state of the organization is as strong as ever.

“The membership is the highest it’s ever been,” Clark said of its 50,000 members. He highlighted the dual-membership partnership between the Georgia Chamber and local chambers of commerce throughout the state. About 500 companies invest in the Chamber at the “leadership” level.

In 2025, the primary projects of the new strategic plan will be workforce development and workforce development. The Chamber also will hold a “Civics Bee” in July, and it will launch a competition for “the coolest thing made in Georgia.” 

Clark added that by 2050, Georgia will have added 4 million new residents, and it’s important for the state to strategically plan for that growth. 

“It’s important for us to talk about what Georgia needs 25 years from now. That’s where we can come together and be bipartisan,” Clark said. “We believe this is the beginning of the innovation economy in Georgia.”

At Eggs & Issues, Elkins laid out his agenda for 2025. “We are going to work shoulder to shoulder to improve our competitiveness, maintaining a stable tax environment,” Elkins said. “We can never take job creation for granted. We are also going to focus on energy and trade policy.”

In a one-hour interview the day after Eggs & Issues, Elkins talked about his history with Norfolk Southern, the railroad’s move to Atlanta, the recent ups and downs the company has experienced, and the environmental and business opportunities for rail transportation.

Elkins joined Norfolk Southern in 1988 after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. He started off as a brakeman, then served as a conductor, locomotive engineer and relief yardmaster before spending two decades in intermodal marketing.

These past four years have been a tumultuous time for Norfolk Southern. 

There was the Covid pandemic and disruptions to the nation’s supply chain. There was the headquarters move to Atlanta. Then, two years ago, the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment caused the company to focus on its safety infrastructure and operations. 

The company also has had three CEOs in the past three years. Jim Squires, who moved the company to Atlanta and built the new headquarters; Alan Shaw, who survived a shareholder battle nearly a year ago but ended up getting fired after it was disclosed that he had had an inappropriate relationship with his chief legal officer; and Mark George, the chief financial officer who became CEO in September 2024.

“I’ve been here 36 years, and 32 of those years were pretty boring,” Elkins said. “I feel we have emerged from all these challenges in a much better place now. The fact we are all in Georgia, in one place, allowed us to have a more unified response.”

Elkins called relocating the headquarters to Georgia “a great move for Norfolk Southern.” Atlanta has always been the company’s operational headquarters. Consolidating all its functions in Atlanta has allowed the company to be more unified.

“I’m very proud with how resilient we as an organization has been through these unprecedented challenges we’ve experienced in the last few years,” Elkins said.

As head of marketing for Norfolk Southern, Elkins made a compelling “value proposition” for rail transportation.

“There’s environmental value and economic value,” Elkins said. Imagine if there was a company that could save customers money, eliminate 70 to 80 percent of carbon emissions, save hundreds of lives lost to truck-passenger vehicle accidents every year, you would probably invest in that company.”

Although Elkins is the first executive of a Class 1 railroad to chair the Georgia Chamber, executives of the Sandersville Railroad Co., a short-line freight railroad transporting primarily kaolin and forest products in central Georgia, have chaired the business organization about five times since the 1970s.

At Eggs & Issues, Elkins reminded business leaders that the railroads helped build Georgia.

“We have now seen it transformed into a logistics hub,” Elkins said during the interview. “You need affordable energy and the infrastructure. That’s what makes Georgia so compelling. The things we do today will impact us 25 years from now.”