Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena and Norfolk Southern CEO Mark George.
The strategic rationale is genuine: eliminating costly handoffs between eastern and western railroads, cutting transit times, winning freight back from trucking. The execution risks are severe: every major American railroad merger in the past thirty years has produced operational chaos. The outcome will not be visible for a decade.
This is not merely a story about railroads. It is whether a deal that makes strong sense on paper can survive contact with operational reality.
The Context
American freight rail has six "Class I" railroads (carriers with annual revenues exceeding $900 million) that control approximately 90% of US rail freight. Over time, the industry has consolidated into two regional duopolies:
West of the Mississippi River: Union Pacific (headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska; $24.2 billion in 2024 revenue, 32,000 route miles across 23 states) competes with BNSF Railway, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.
East of the Mississippi River: Norfolk Southern (headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, $12.1 billion, 19,000 route miles across 22 states) competes with CSX Transportation.
There are also two Canadian carriers (Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City) operating networks extending into the United States.
This structure creates an operational problem. Freight moving coast-to-coast must transfer between railroads at junction points (Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis) where cargo waits while the receiving railroad processes paperwork, reconciles systems, and accepts responsibility. A container of electronics from a port in New Jersey bound for California may sit in a Chicago rail yard for two or three days, adding cost and unpredictability that makes trucking, despite higher fuel costs, often the rational choice for time-sensitive freight.
The proposed merger would eliminate this divide. Norfolk Southern shareholders would receive one Union Pacific share plus $88.82 in cash per share, valuing the company at $320 per share (a standard 25% premium). Jim Vena, Union Pacific's CEO since August 2023 and a 40-year railroad veteran who started as a brakeman, would lead the combined entity. Mark George, Norfolk Southern's CEO since September 2024, installed after activist investor Ancora Holdings ousted his predecessor following a derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, would see his railroad absorbed.
The Surface Transportation Board (STB), the independent federal agency with exclusive jurisdiction over railroad mergers, received a 7,000-page application in December 2025. In January 2026, they unanimously rejected it as incomplete. Refile is expected in March, with closing targeted for early 2027. Critically, this will be the first major merger evaluated under the STB's 2001 rules, which require applicants to prove the transaction will enhance competition, a standard adopted after catastrophic service failures following earlier consolidations in the industry.
The Case For: A Problem Worth Solving
The strategic rationale for the merger is not manufactured as the interchange problem is real and shippers have complained about it for decades. Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern estimate that single-line service would eliminate handoff delays for roughly one million shipments annually, cutting 24 to 48 hours from coast-to-coast transit. Oliver Wyman, the consultancy, projects that faster and simpler rail service would convert 105,000 truckloads annually to rail in underserved central US markets.
The companies project $2.75 billion in annual synergies, including $1 billion from operational efficiencies and $1.75 billion from revenue growth as freight shifts from highway to rail. Over 2,000 letters of support were secured, including more than 500 from shippers. SMART-TD, the largest American rail union, endorsed the deal after securing commitments to preserve all union positions. Over 99% of shareholders at both companies approved the transaction in November 2025.
Vena's background lends credibility. Unlike financial engineers parachuted into corner offices, he spent four decades operating trains before running them. If anyone understands what integration requires, the argument goes, it is someone who has worked every job from brakeman to CEO.
The Case Against: The Synergy Mirage
The sceptics do not dispute the strategic rationale but the assumption that this management team, or any management team, can execute an integration of this complexity without destroying what they are attempting to build.
Railroads are uniquely unforgiving of integration failures. Trains run around the clock on fixed infrastructure and a congestion problem in one-yard cascades within hours to yards hundreds of miles away. IT systems must communicate in real time and there is no grace period for reconciliation. Safety regulations permit no shortcuts. And unlike trucking, you cannot simply reroute around a problem: the tracks go where they go. This is why railroad mergers fail catastrophically rather than merely underperforming: the network amplifies errors instead of absorbing them.
The historical record is unambiguous:
1996: the Union Pacific–Southern Pacific merger produced a two-year meltdown. Houston, the nerve centre of the combined network, became gridlocked. Trains backed up for hundreds of miles. Shippers diverted cargo to trucks. A case study by Kellogg School of Management professors Robert Gallamore and Patrick Lortie documented how the catastrophe cost Union Pacific billions and damaged the broader American economy.
1999: the Conrail split between Norfolk Southern and CSX produced eighteen months of IT failures and operational paralysis.
2025: Even the far smaller 2023 Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern combination stumbled in May, when an IT system cutover caused service disruptions severe enough to prompt STB intervention.
The projected $2.75 billion in synergies deserves scrutiny. Academic research by economists John Bitzan and Wesley Wilson, published in the Review of Industrial Organization (2007), examined railroad mergers from 1983 to 2003 and found "tremendous differences across mergers with respect to the direction, level, timing, and source of cost impacts." Some mergers delivered substantial savings and others increased costs. An earlier study by MIT economists Ernst Berndt and Ann Friedlaender (Journal of Productivity Analysis, 1993) found that cost reductions from mergers ranged from 33% for Burlington Northern to a 3% cost increase for CSX. In M&A, neither cost synergies nor revenue synergies are assured.
Competitor BNSF Railway has mounted aggressive opposition, arguing in an October 2025 position paper that the combined carrier would control 45% of US freight tonnage. BNSF's Chief of Staff Zak Andersen posed a direct challenge: 'No customer is asking for this. This is strictly a Wall Street play for shareholders.' Two major unions, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division, withdrew their support in December 2025, citing safety concerns.
Reflections for Business Leaders
What separates railroad mergers that deliver value from those that destroy it?
The academic research points to a consistent pattern. Mergers that succeed tend to be "end-to-end" i.e. connecting complementary networks rather than consolidating parallel routes. The Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern combination fits this criterion as the two railroads meet at interchange points rather than competing head-to-head. But end-to-end structure is necessary, not sufficient. The 1996 Union Pacific–Southern Pacific merger was also end-to-end and still produced a catastrophe.
Strategic fit does not guarantee operational success. The question is not whether the networks connect but whether the organisations can be combined without destroying what makes them function.
The differentiating factor in M&A, across industries, is whether acquirers understand what they are buying well enough to avoid destroying it during integration. It is crucial to distinguish between "Hard Keys" (financial structure, legal terms, strategic rationale) and "Soft Keys" (leadership selection, cultural integration, and operational continuity). Transactions that prioritised Soft Keys showed a 26% higher probability of success, according to KPMG. Yet the standard M&A playbook focuses almost exclusively on Hard Keys, because they are easier to quantify and defend.
In railroads, the Soft Keys are brutally concrete. They include the institutional knowledge of dispatchers who understand how to route trains through congested yards, the relationships between operating crews and maintenance teams that enable problems to be solved before they cascade, the informal practices that keep 50,000 miles of track functioning around the clock. These capabilities do not appear in due diligence documents. They are precisely what integration destroys when executed poorly, and what the meltdowns of 1996, 1999, and 2025 obliterated.
The honest assessment is that the outcome of this merger is genuinely uncertain. The strategic rationale is sound. The execution risk is severe. Vena's operational credibility is real, but individual leadership has never been sufficient to overcome structural integration failures. The 2001 STB rules impose stricter scrutiny, but regulatory oversight has never prevented a meltdown—only provided mechanisms to address one after the damage is done.
The stakes extend beyond shareholders. If the integration succeeds i.e. if Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern can maintain service levels, retain experienced personnel, and satisfy shippers through the transition, they will have achieved something no American railroad merger has achieved in thirty years. If it fails, the pattern will repeat i.e. service collapses, shippers defect, and the consequences fall on workers, customers, and communities along 50,000 miles of track.
The STB will render a regulatory verdict by 2027. The operational verdict will take a decade, long after the current CEOs have moved on and the M&A advisory fees have been collected. The business leaders worth watching are not those who engineer the deal, but those who live with its consequences. In M&A in general, as in railroads, the test of responsible stewardship is not the transaction, but the decade that follows.
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Amine Laouedj Managing Director, Glenshore
I advise responsible business leaders who wish to ensure their company ends up in the right hands and continues to flourish after their exit. If these perspectives resonate with your thoughts, I welcome a conversation. Please connect or message me on LinkedIn.
Glenshore is a boutique investment bank with the Succession M&A Playbook, a disciplined approach to align financial outcomes with long-term mission and legacy preservation. Learn more at glenshore.com.