AP: UNION PACIFIC, NORFOLK SOUTHERN DISCUSS MERGER TO CREATE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD.
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are in merger talks to create the largest railroad in North America that would connect the East and West Coasts.
The merger discussions began during the first quarter of this year, according to a person familiar with the talks who isn’t authorized to discuss them publicly. It would combine the largest and smallest of the country’s six major freight railroads.
Both railroads declined to comment.
Within the industry there is widespread debate over whether such a merger would be approved by the Surface Transportation Board even though those regulators approved the deal that created CPKC railroad two years ago with the Canadian Pacific’s $31 billion acquisition of Kansas City Southern railroad.
That merger combined the two smallest major railroads in North America and left only six major freight railroads. But it was the first major rail merger approved in more than two decades.
The bar for railroad mergers in the U.S. was raised substantially at the start of the century after a disastrous combination of Union Pacific and Southern Pacific in 1996 that snarled rail traffic for an extended period, followed by the 1999 split of Conrail between Norfolk Southern and CSX, which created backups in the East.
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Citi Research analyst Ariel Rosa said in a research note that a major transcontinental railroad merger “would likely prove costly and time consuming, risking a years-long distraction to management, while facing significant pushback from regulators, politicians, employee unions, competitors, customers, and other stakeholders.”
Not to be confused with America’s first intercontinental railroad: New gaffe: Obama hails America’s historic building of ‘the Intercontinental Railroad.’
—The Los Angeles Times, September 23rd, 2011.
Not content with being Mr. Amtrak, Joe had even loftier railroading ambitions than his boss:
BIDEN: "We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean…
I'm going off-script. I'm gonna get in trouble." pic.twitter.com/M6GHT0dS8y
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 15, 2023
As Steve wrote at the time: Biden Wants to Build an 8,000-Mile Ocean Train and I Say Let’s Do This! “On today’s installment of ‘What the Hell Did Biden Actually Just Say?’ we have the alleged president of the most powerful country in the world announcing his plan to build, and I quote, ’a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean.’”