Good day ladies, and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q1 2012 L. B. Foster Earnings Conference Call. My name is Tracey and I’ll be your operator for today. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. David Russo, Chief Financial Officer. Please proceed, sir.

Thank you, Christie. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us for L. B. Foster Company’s earnings conference call to review the company’s first quarter 2012 operating results. My name is David Russo and I am the Chief Financial Officer of L. B. Foster. Hosting the call today is Mr. Robert Bauer, L. B. Foster’s President and CEO. This morning Bob will provide an overview of the company’s first quarter performance, give an update on critical business issues and discuss marketing conditions. Afterward I will review the company’s first quarter financial performance and then we’ll open up the session for questions. Means to access this conference call via webcast were disclosed in our earnings press release and were posted on the L. B. Foster company website under the investor relations page. This webcast will be archived and available for 7 days. During today’s call our commentary and responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements, including items such as the company’s outlook for 2012 and beyond, our thoughts regarding the concrete type product claim, cash flows, margins and capital expenditures. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation and we do undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these statements in light of new information or future events. All participants are encouraged to referred L. B. Foster’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2011 as well as to other documents filed with securities and exchange commission for additional information about L. B. Foster and to learn more about the risk factors that may affect our results. Additionally, while forward-looking statements will be made today, L. B. Foster does not provide the specific earnings guidance. With that we will commence our discussion, and I will turn it over to Bob Bauer.

Thank you, Dave, and then thank you, everyone, for joining us this point. I’m happy to report that overall it was a very good quarter for the company and I’m very pleased to announce our earnings per share of $0.33 for the quarter. I want to begin by thanking our employees for their efforts delivering another solid quarter with numerous programs underway that ended up improving operations and customer focus in the company and I’m happy to report that our customers satisfaction ratings remain very high, which I think is indicative of the order input that we’ve also had in the first quarter. We reported sales of $180 million on bookings of $175 million. I was particularly happy with the bookings number, which is up around 7% over the prior year, which helped us increased backlog $56 million in the quarter. And as Will did discuss, together the rail and tubular products businesses are doing very well. They helped us make up for a weaker than expected construction market and are really the drivers in this quarter’s operating results. I'll go through each of those 3 businesses briefly here before Dave covers more information on the financials. The rail business sales were up 7.2% and we continue to benefit from continuing strength in the capital projects and maintenance programs with the class one railroads. Spending was strong for them in the first quarter, which we think was helped by mild weather and the fact that they could pull some of these projects forward and get started on them a little bit earlier. Activity with our core rail distribution business and our insulated joint products was very good, our backlog in the concrete ties product line for 2 facilities is very strong, in some cases with backlog that goes out into…

Okay. Thank you, Bob. Sales for the first quarter of 2012 were $118.5 million compared to $117.1 million in the prior year, a 1.2% increase. The sales increase was due to a 7.2% increase in rail product sales, a 61.7% increase in tubular product sales that was partially offset by 14.4% decline in construction product sales. The rail sales improvement was principally due to increases in rail distribution and our Allegheny Rail Products line. Concrete tie sales were essentially flat as the decline caused by the closure of CXT’s Grand Island facility was offset by increases at our Spokane and Tucson facilities. The tubular product sales increase was due to sales increases in both tubular divisions, Coated Products as well as Threaded Products, which were driven principally by volume increases. The construction product sales decrease was principally due to a decline in sales of piling products as well as a decline in sales of our fabricated products businesses, partially offset by small sales increase in our concrete buildings division in the first quarter of this year. As mentioned in our earnings release, backlog stood at $201.7 million at the end of the first quarter, up $56.3 million from December of ‘11, but down $35.4 million or 15% from March of 2011. This year-over-year decline was due principally to the construction products backlog decline, which was down by about 38%, partially offset by increases in tubular products and the slight increase in our rail products backlog. The trend on bookings has been positive, as new orders received during the first quarter of ‘12 increased by 7.1%, as Bob mentioned, compared to last year. This increase was due to strong bookings in our rail products group, which increased by about 30% over the prior year quarter. Construction segment bookings declined by about…

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Liam Burke from Janney.

Bob, you made a comment on friction management, that the coal volume shipments with the MileOne are down 10% and affected the friction management business. Is that the only gating factor on friction management or are you seeing some opportunities beyond that? I know you mentioned the U. K, but could you give us more detail on friction management?

Yes. There is clearly more opportunity beyond just coal. What I was commenting on was the fact that-- and it wasn’t weather related, it was actually just based on the amount of coal that gets moved on the rail lines, which accounts for about 45% of the volume in the real business. So the fact that those shipments were down in the U. S. 10% while they’re up in Canada, what it means is if you are putting friction management product on the heavy coal lines, which is where we get a fair amount of our business, we weren't seeing as much traffic there. So the replenishment of some of the friction modifiers we put on the rail was lower than we thought we would normally see. So it was really related to the traffic on those lines more so than it was the weather. But we get friction management sales direct from OEMs as -- and we’re in both the lubricant products or the friction modifiers, as we call them -- as well as the equipment to lubricate the track. So it’s not all related to traffic.

And how did the Salient do this quarter?

Salient, their sales were still low. We haven’t seen the uptake in that business yet that we would like to see. There is a next generation product that we are working on that we would like to see finished by the completion of the end of the year. That will improve our cost position. There is a future generation of software that is included with that, that will take it to the more state of the art operating system, as well as improve the database management function of it. We think that’s going to give us a boost and is going to attract more people, but we also need to get some business outside at the U. S. on that product line because our penetration rate in the U. S. is up at a point where -- we’d really like to start looking outside the U. S. for additional growth opportunities. Our business leader with salient, in fact, was just in Brazil, and there is some optimistic news coming from customers that we're after in that particular market. So, we are beginning to turn our attention there for what we think will be good growth opportunities. But I would tell you that this business is-- the sales are still below where we would like to see them, we are still funding this business, but we believe it is the right kind of business for us to fund, it’s got great technology and it should be able to help the rail companies improve their operations in the long run.

And Dave, do you have a forecast for CapEx that you can talk about?

Yes. Between $9 million and $10 million this year, Liam.

Your next question comes from the line of Brent Thielman from DA Davidson.

Yes. I guess just on the construction products margins, 14% drop in sales, but your margins are flat year-over-year. Is there a mix shift which is benefiting those comparisons within that segment?

Not really. Not really. I mean, piling is by far the biggest sales business in the segment. But all of our business units did a pretty good job, we struggled a little bit on the buildings business because of the low production levels that we typically experience in the first quarter, but we did a good job in all the businesses keeping the margins reasonable and as Bob mentioned, some cost reduction and efficiency programs that kept the margins reasonable.

And should we take that as a sign that sort of pricing isn't getting any worse for you guys. I know it’s been tough through this downturn, but is that a reasonable sign?

Yes, it is. Yes. I would say that it is. If you just look at piling all by itself, as Dave said, it wasn’t mix that contributed to the margin improvement. Just piling on its own, gross profit margins were better than the prior year on down sales. So, we think we are covering any inflation that we see and haven’t had to fight it out so much on price with the projects we’re winning.

Okay. And then Bob, you mentioned seeing some energy companies moving forward with sort of industrial facilities and some bookings there. What specifically are you doing for those types of projects?

We are actually selling piling product into those projects. So in the one example I was talking about, it’s an integrated oil company, building a new facility. And in the construction of that particular plant, we’re selling our traditional piling products into that construction project.

Okay. Okay, interesting. And then on the tubular segment, real nice contributions there as well, just curious how will that -- I guess the new threaded facility sort of impact margins and profitability as that plant ramps up?

Well, we expect increased efficiency in that facility, Brent, but we obviously made a fairly sizable investment that will start appreciating as well. So the first year, this year, you’re probably not going to see a whole lot of change in margin, but we do expect to as we are able to improve our volumes, and as Bob mentioned, work with our JV partner, we expect margins to increase in future years.

Okay. Then just last one for me, and Dave, I’m sorry if you already said this, but on SG&A, were there significant costs associated with the claim that sort of inflated SG&A this quarter?

Yes. The -- we incurred a little over $900,000, Brent in the testing costs for the concrete ties.

Your final question comes from Scott Blumenthal from Emerald Advisers.

Bob, can you -- you did make a comment that you expect to report on the resolution sometime maybe this quarter. Could you maybe give us what you believe might be a time-frame as to actually getting the whole thing resolved, or is that just not possible at this point?

Yes, it’s too difficult to do that. If we get substantial news and conclude, not just only all of the testing and the analysis, but the resolution of this with an acceptable agreement with Union Pacific on how we proceed, we may discuss that before our next earnings call. But I’m putting the date out there as far as our next earnings call because it always seems that it takes a little bit longer than you’d like to get this done. But I’ll be very disappointed if we don’t have it done by that time.

Okay. So I guess from what you’re saying, can I gather that there has been some type of an agreement on how at least the resolution will be reached or do we still have to agree on that too?

There has been no agreement on how the resolution will be reached.

Okay.

All of that still needs to be finalized.

Okay. I guess moving to the tubular business, have you given guidance on what you expect the margins to be in the Threaded business, will that help overall tubular margins or is that going to be a drag in the near-term as we ramp and then eventually help them. Maybe you can give us a little context there?

That’s actually getting down probably a little too granular for the type of guidance we give, especially with regards to margins, Scott. It represents perhaps half of that segment. But what we can tell you is that Threaded margins have improved over the past couple of years and this is the next step to take that next leap and step-up as far as our margins in the tubular business goes. So, we just had a call where a caller asked about especially the move to Magnolia, and we expect that remainder of this year to be somewhat consistent with the first quarter results and any step-up in improvement really is going to probably come next year.

Okay, Bob. That’s fair. And maybe could you give us an idea as to the uptake of the current customers from the coating business and what portion of them are actually interested in moving to the next step, threading, or how much do you expect to get from the outside non-coating part of the business?

Maybe we ought to start by saying, we don’t really share customers between the coating and the threaded business. The bulk of our coated products go into the oil and gas and pipeline markets. And our threaded piping goes into largely water well applications in the agricultural market. So, we really serve those 2 markets with 2 different channels, so there really isn’t any overlap in terms of the go-to market with those 2 products.

Thank you. We have no further questions. So I would like to turn the call over to the President and CEO for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everyone. I appreciate your comments and questions. We’re happy that you could join us today. We look forward to talking with you next quarter. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes your presentation for today. You may now disconnect. Thank you for joining, and have a very good day.