Editor's Note: When the top law enforcement officers of six states feel compelled to stand before a federal regulator and demand answers, the railroads have a problem they cannot lobby their way out of. Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern filed seven amendments to a merger application already deemed incomplete, and the attorneys general of Montana, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota are not satisfied. These are not union halls raising the alarm.. these are red state conservatives telling Wall Street that consolidation has gone far enough. The workers have always known what the suits are just beginning to admit.. fewer railroads means less competition, higher costs, and a workforce held hostage to the balance sheet of a monopoly.

Editor's Note: Nearly thirty years after Union Pacific swallowed Southern Pacific, the STB is being asked whether UP ever honored the conditions it accepted to make that merger possible in the first place. BNSF alleges a deliberate, systematic pattern of blocking competitor access to customers that were supposed to remain contested.. and the board itself acknowledged that if true, the consequences for shippers and competition would be severe. UP’s answer is to hide behind private arbitration, a venue conveniently stripped of the authority to fix what BNSF says is broken. The regulators who blessed consolidation generation after generation are now confronting the bill that working railroaders and captive shippers have been paying all along.

Bill Stephens | May 26

The Surface Transportation Board today stopped short of rejecting BNSF Railway’s request that regulators review Union Pacific’s compliance with conditions that the board imposed to preserve competition after UP’s 1996 acquisition of Southern Pacific.

In a November petition, BNSF claimed UP had engaged in a pattern of obstructing BNSF access to customers once served by both SP and UP. Under merger conditions, BNSF is allowed to serve customers at these so-called 2-to-1 locations.

The board acknowledged BNSF’s allegations — if proven — could have serious consequences for shippers and rail competition. The decision also noted that private arbitration, which UP argues is the appropriate venue, can’t address the kind of systemic, pattern-of-conduct questions BNSF is raising, and that arbitrators lack authority to modify the railroads’ settlement conditions.

Editor's Note: The STB has frozen the UP-NS merger review and demanded answers by July 27... and the chorus of opposition that greeted that decision tells you everything about who this deal actually serves. Shippers, labor, and regulators alike are pressing the same question.. how does combining two of the last four Class I railroads meet the public good rather than simply the quarterly earnings targets of Wall Street shareholders? The application has been deemed technically complete while remaining, in the words of freight advocates, dangerously lacking in transparency. Railroaders have watched this industry consolidate from dozens of carriers down to a handful, and they know that every merger promises competition it never delivers and accountability it never keeps.

Bill Stephens | May 28

Opponents and critics of Union Pacific’s proposed acquisition of Norfolk Southern today welcomed the Surface Transportation Board’s skeptical look at the railroads’ revised merger application.

Regulators accepted the application while freezing the review of the merger and requiring UP and NS to submit additional information by July 27.

“This Board action demonstrates that even though the second submitted application is deemed ‘complete’ it is still lacking in transparency that is essential for the Board and stakeholders to conduct a thorough review of the impacts of this unprecedented transaction,” said Nancy O’Liddy, executive director of the National Industrial Transportation League. “More information is needed regarding how the combined UP-NS will: 1) meet the public good; 2) enhance rail-to-rail competition; 3) mitigate anti-competitive practices involving gateway access and pricing, and joint asset ownership; and 4) be held accountable for service failures and increased fees.”

Editor's Note: When the CEO of Canadian National stands before an investor conference and tells the world that the UP-NS merger cannot meet the public interest standard as written, the railroads’ own peer class has rendered its verdict. Tracy Robinson is not speaking out of altruism.. CN sees an opening to extract trackage rights, line sales, and gateway access from a deal desperate enough for approval to give them away. But buried in the competitive maneuvering of executives is an admission that has echoed through every merger proceeding for thirty years.. consolidation destroys competition, and the only way to paper over that destruction is to carve the network back up and hand pieces to whoever is watching. Railroaders built every mile of that infrastructure, and they will be the last to benefit from whatever remedies the STB extracts from this transaction.

Bill Stephens / May 27

Various remedies — including trackage rights, haulage rights, and line sales — will be required for the proposed Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger to clear competition-related regulatory hurdles, Canadian National CEO Tracy Robinson says.

The railroads’ merger application, as currently written, cannot meet the Surface Transportation Board requirements that the $85 billion deal is in the public interest and enhances competition, Robinson told an investor conference today.

“We believe that our network could be very useful in introducing competition, and driving our network further down into the U.S. markets for example, and introducing another competitive option in some of the markets that we don’t currently serve,” Robinson says.



Options to enhance competition, she says, include trackage rights, haulage rights, interline agreements, line divestitures, and interchange commitments at various gateways.

Editor's Note: The STB has accepted the UP-NS merger application for consideration.. and then immediately put the entire proceeding on ice, demanding nine categories of supplemental information by July 27 because key elements remain, in the board’s own words, unclear and underdeveloped. Two rejected or stalled applications, months of delay, and still the railroads cannot tell regulators with a straight face how an $85 billion consolidation of the last four Class I carriers serves the public interest. Shares of both companies fell roughly five percent on the news. Wall Street reading the same tea leaves that rail labor has been reading for years. The workers who will be furloughed, the shippers who will be captive, and the communities that will lose service are not waiting on a July 27 deadline to know what this merger is really about.

Progressive Railroading / May 28

The Surface Transportation Board (STB) today announced a unanimous decision to accept the revised Union Pacific Railroad-Norfolk Southern Railway merger application for consideration.



The railroads' first application was rejected by the STB on Jan. 16 because it did not contain enough information for the board to evaluate if the $85 billion transaction is in the public's interest. The STB determined the railroads' revised application — submitted on April 30 — still contains aspects that are "unclear or underdeveloped" and ordered UP and NS to submit supplemental information by July 27.

Editor's Note: The President of the United States has floated the idea of a government equity stake in Union Pacific’s merger with Norfolk Southern, and whatever his motives, the admission buried inside that suggestion is one rail labor has made for decades.. this infrastructure is too essential to be left entirely in the hands of men whose only obligation is to a quarterly earnings report. Rail workers did not build this network so that Wall Street could consolidate it down to a handful of carriers and call it progress. The government that spent generations handing land grants and tax breaks to these railroads is only now beginning to ask what the public gets in return. We have been asking that question from the shop floor and the cab since long before it became a talking point for presidents.

Bill Stephens | May 22, 2026

President Donald Trump suggested in an interview with Fortune Magazine that he may want the federal government to take a stake in Union Pacific as part of its proposed merger with Norfolk Southern.

The railroad merger comment came as Trump was explaining his broader views on having the government take equity stakes in companies that are deemed essential to the nation, such as computer chip maker Intel or U.S. Steel, and as a way to reduce the national debt.



Fortune quotes the president as saying, “I make one of those deals every day that no normal person would make,” while telling Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell about a possible railroad merger that he would want the government to have equity in.

The Fortune story was published online on Monday and did not quote the president mentioning UP or NS by name.



Independent analyst Anthony B. Hatch called the president’s comments “insanity.”

Editor's Note: The Railway Safety Act has been attached to the Build America 250 Act, and the Association of American Railroads has responded the way it always responds... by declaring that any safety mandate Congress has the audacity to pass is an unproven burden on the supply chain, an affront to data-driven governance, and a threat to American farmers and consumers. Ian Jefferies would have you believe that 2025’s safety record proves the industry needs no legislative guardrails, which is a remarkable argument to make on behalf of the same industry whose tank cars torched East Palestine while its lobbyists were busy blocking the very regulations that might have prevented it. The AAR has called every safety advance in the history of this industry an overreach right up until the moment it became standard practice, and then claimed credit for it. RWU knows what “targeted and justified by data” means when it comes from a carrier lobby.. it means no.

David C. Lester / May 22

The Railway Safety Act, which has been bouncing around in Congress since 2023 in response to the Norfolk Southern East Palestine, Ohio, derailment in the same year, was reintroduced in 2026. The Act received a boost this week as the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee decided to attach it to a more extensive piece of transportation legislation, the Build America 250 Act, which focuses on funding for rail and highway transportation development projects.

Ian Jefferies, AAR President and CEO, released the following statement in response to this Congressional action:

“Freight railroads have been clear from the beginning of the surface transportation reauthorization process: rail policy provisions should be targeted, justified by data, and tied to clearly demonstrated operational or safety needs. Unfortunately, some provisions advanced today fail that test. Rather than focusing narrowly on evidence-based reforms connected to the actual causes of incidents like East Palestine, the package includes a wide range of extraneous mandates under the veil of safety that will only increase costs throughout the freight network and broader supply chain with no proven safety benefit – ultimately harming rail customers, manufacturers, energy producers, farmers and American consumers already facing significant affordability pressures. That’s precisely why so many rail customer groups expressed concern about these very provisions.

This approach is particularly misguided given that 2025 marked the safest year in freight rail industry history across several key safety measures, including historic lows in derailments, equipment-caused accidents, track-caused accidents, and employee injury rates. These gains were achieved through sustained private investment, technological innovation, and data-driven safety practices – not static federal mandates. The Railway Safety Act, as written, violates the President’s pledge to lower costs, and is an unfortunate example that politics and special-interest pressure can sometimes usurp sound, data-driven policymaking during today’s proceedings. 

Today’s markup is the first step in what will be a long legislative process, and freight railroads will continue working constructively with lawmakers to support policies that strengthen safety, promote innovation, and preserve an efficient and competitive freight transportation system. At a time when Congress is simultaneously greenlighting autonomous transportation technologies in other sectors, efforts to include rail policies that lock yesterday’s operating models into federal law are nothing more than hypocrisy.”

BMWED / May 21

During the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee markup of the BUILD America 250 Act, U.S. Representative Dina Titus (D-NV) introduced an amendment (Amendment 294) that includes language from her Secure Tracks Act protecting visual track inspection frequencies by codifying the twice per week visual track inspection requirement while also requiring railroads to use Track Geometry Measurement Systems (TGMS) as a supplement, not a replacement to human visual inspections. Representative Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) co-led the amendment.

In a bipartisan 35-31 vote, members of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee adopted the Titus and Van Drew amendment that includes important language from our Secure Tracks Act.

The BMWED would like to thank the 35 members, including 4 Republicans and 31 Democrats, who value the safety of their communities and rail workers and voted to ensure that our rail infrastructure continues to be inspected and monitored by knowledgeable experts.