6 ms·

A Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern combination would redraw the railroad map

73 points by throw0101c 1y ago

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
Wikipedia has a combined map of UP & NS, for some reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Union_Pacific_and_Norfolk_Southern_Railroads.webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Union_Pacific_and_Norfolk...
- gs17 1y ago
  And ethanol plants, which I was surprised to find out is actually a big deal for rail (or rail is a big deal for ethanol?). I guess I never put much thought into how much of it was being produced and how it was being moved around. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_railNA_a_EPOOXE_RAIL_mbbl_m.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_railNA_a_EPOOXE_RAIL_m...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - wombatpm 1y ago
    Chemical plants in general have rail spurs to move products out and raw materials in.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Most industrial plants have rail connections to move bulk materials. It’s more economical than trucks for some stuff. Chemicals, crude oil, cut lumber, all cheaper by rail than by truck - though trucks haul 65%+ of goods in America, they are often used for last mile for those materials.
bell-cot 1y ago
I'd regard Trains magazine as experts in the industry. That said, they're obviously reluctant to criticize the larger railroads.
echelon 1y ago
Welp, there goes the brand new HQ that Norfolk Southern built in Atlanta...
- zieski 1y ago
  More likely the UP headquarters in Omaha, just like Enron moving Northern Natural Gas to Houston
qwerty456127 1y ago
Let them run the railroad, let others run the trains.
- CGMthrowaway 1y ago
  What does this comment mean?
  - cheschire 1y ago
    When one company controls both the trains AND the infrastructure, it results in an unfair advantage over anyone else wishing to use the rail. Commuter trains needing to pull over to let cargo trains from the parent company through, for example.
    - CGMthrowaway 1y ago
      I see. So you are suggesting like a Standard Oil or British Rail type breakup?
      - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
        No, they're suggesting something more along the lines of Standard Oil being required to refine anyone's oil in their refinery, or carry it in their pipelines. But the one suggesting it didn't offer to let anyone stay in their house, and to me that's the same issue. Does the owner of private property get to control access and use, or not? You say that the railroad is a business, not a private residence. All right, does Home Depot have to let Lowe's use part of their floor space? No, they don't.
        AlotOfReading 1y ago
        Property owners generally don't have complete freedom to control access, hence easements. Even if those weren't a thing, there's a coherent political view (which I'm not arguing for) that "resolves" the issue: nationalizing the infrastructure and licensing access back like the UK. It's a strawman though. There's no reason anyone needs to hold identical political views on the property rights of private houses, home improvement stores, and rail infrastructure. They're different things.
bpodgursky 1y ago
FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes. There's no real way for railroads to be be competitive unless they are fighting for the same customers (and UP/NS are not). So, the statements about improved operational efficiency are not totally implausible.
- throw0101c 1y ago
  > FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes. And cable companies also don't have overlapping territory, so from the consumer point of view it did not reduce competition. But from the 'other side' when there are fewer ISPs then tech companies can be squeezed because there are fewer paths to eye-balls overall and each path has more influence because instead of two ISPs have 10% of Netflix customers, now one has 20%: * https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-to-pay-comcast-for-internet-traffic https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t... Similarly with Amazon and books: while cheap consumer prices may look great, from the book publishers' perspective there's a choke point to readers, and so now the publishers have to consolidate to get market power over Amazon. And if this goes through, do you think the other Class Is will sit around? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Class_I_railroads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Class_I_railroads CSX is mostly east of the Mississippi, while BNSF is west: what about that kind of merger? Or CN or CP doing the same thing?
  - bpodgursky 1y ago
    Who is the equivalent of Netflix in this relationship? You can't draw fuzzy-wuzzy analogies without actually spelling out the connection. Freight rail is not an eyeball market, the customers are the ones paying.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - 1y ago
polarbear67 1y ago
What's the argument for the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger [1]? Any rational admin would shoot down the merger immediately as this will create a massive monopoly. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/union-pacific-talks-advance-regulator-readies-historic-rail-merger-review-2025-07-24/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/union-pacific-talks-advance...
- bpodgursky 1y ago
  They share essentially zero miles of track or routes. A move only creates a monopoly if it reduces consumer choice. No freight customer is deciding "Oh I can either ship from LA to Seattle, or Miami to DC." They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage.
  - liveoneggs 1y ago
    That is a big assumption on your part that east coast ports don't compete with west coast ports
  - lokar 1y ago
    How about monopsony?
  - throw0101c 1y ago
    > They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage. If someone on the US west coast wants to ship to the US east (or vice versa) they can pit UP against BNSF, and then NS against CSX. There are a few pairs up because of the two negotiating points: * UP-NS * UP-CSX * BNSF-NS * BNSP-CSX If the merger goes through you're now at: * merged-UPNS * BNSF-CSX Do you think UPNS will give a cheaper price for a 'half-trip' and you go to their competitor the other half? You don't think BNSF/CN/CP aren't looking at CSX right now?
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  Monopoly? No. Union Pacific plus Norfolk Southern would have a monopoly on single-line end-to-end rail service in the US, true, but that's the kind of thing that you can get a "monopoly" in. BNSF and CSX interchange with each other, after all. And BNSF and CSX could (and almost certainly would) merge in response. So there's no monopoly argument. Which doesn't mean that a rational regulator would not turn it down anyway. But rational regulators may not be running the show at the moment. UP sees that there may be an opportunity during the Trump administration. (Note "may" - nobody knows whether there is an opportunity, but there is more of a chance than there was under Biden.)
cheschire 1y ago
Any time I hear the names of train companies in America, I am always transported back a few decades, playing Rail Baron with my family. For those that have never heard of that game, please enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neWZVhmSFJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neWZVhmSFJs
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  Ticket to Ride is thought to be RB's natural successor. ref: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/94883/rail-baron-comparing-nostalgia-to-modern-favorites https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/94883/rail-baron-comparing-...
- DavidPeiffer 1y ago
  I think about a book I found in Texas at a thrift store. Poor's 1925 Railroad Section [1] is a thick book containing details about every (?) railroad in the US such as miles of track, tons hauled, revenue, recent mergers, etc. I'm not sure whether there is digitized data for railroad performance from the era, but it seemed like it'd be a neat dataset to assemble and research. https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Poors-1925-Railroad-Section-Unknown-Publishing/6496006524/bd https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Poors-1925-Railroad-S...
hecanjog 1y ago
Would this have an impact on Amtrak service? The trains in my area often get stopped by freight traffic, and Chicago is pretty much a mandatory change-over point. Could this allow some routes to open up connecting each side of the Mississippi more fluidly in the longer term? We got a new route (well, a new train running on a segment of an existing route, offering more flexibility for scheduling) from MSP to CHI recently, which has been great.
- lokar 1y ago
  I don’t see how Amtrak survives the next 3 years
  - kortilla 1y ago
    What’s changed? That general sentiment has been around for the last 15-20 years but they keep plugging along.
    - lokar 1y ago
      The gridlock in Washington has been mostly resolved. The party is power can do pretty much anything. And the current party is power is against Amtrak .
      - bediger4000 1y ago
        I'm not disputing the party in power and how it hates Amtrak, but how many bills did the House pass so far this year? Gridlock got replaced with monumental Republican incompetence.
        lokar 1y ago
        He can just replace the board, stop writing checks, or send someone to kick them out of their building. All apparently legal.
  - hecanjog 1y ago
jmyeet 1y ago
Private railroads are a mistake. Let's see what the private railroad industry has done. The railroads kept reducing their workforce to get an uptick in profitability, so much so that there wasn't enough spare capacity for railroad workers to get paid sick leave of any kind. The railroad workforce were taking industrial action to get paid sick leave. What happened? Congress stepped in to use legislation to end a labor dispute for essential workers to side with the company. Oh and this was under Biden. As an aside, a later deal was made to give them a handful of paid sick days, quietly. If the railroad caved to 100% of the union's demands it would've cost 6% of the company's profits. Not revenue. Profits. The other is an industry wide effort called Precision Scheduled Railroads ("PSR"). Basically this means having trains with twice as many carriages and skipping safety chcecks because that costs money. There are over 1000 train derailments a year. Most of these aren't a big deal. Others are like East Palestine, Ohio a few years ago, which caused a toxic spill in a populated area, something that continues to be an issue [1]. A lot of toxic chemicals are transported by rail. What was insane was the media didn't report on the East Palestine derailment for a week to 10 days despite there being a black toxic plume that could be seen from space. They were finally embarrassed into covering it by social media, particularly Tiktok. All railroad companies do to maintain and increase profits is cut costs, pretty much like every other company. That means suppressing wages, skimping on maintenance and safety and not investing in fixing anything. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/05/1228772709/east-palestine-train-derailment-norfolk-southern-lawsuit-epa https://www.npr.org/2024/02/05/1228772709/east-palestine-tra...
- Aloha 1y ago
  They built the railroads, often on their own dime, and paid taxes by the fistful for them. Their competition was subsidized by the general government, and continues to be every year. If you want to argue that nationalizing railroads should be done for the public good, do that - dont just demonize them, because its not a fully winning argument.
  - esseph 1y ago
    They spend a LOT on lobbying and politics.
alexose 1y ago
The rules that govern American railroads are impressively weird and arcane. They seem almost impossible to unravel at this point. Which is a shame, because so many American cities sacrifice the central corridors of their city to huge railyards and slow-moving freight trains. I think of Portland, Oregon, where the tracks run north/south along the river. You can see them sitting there empty while you're stuck in traffic on I-5, which runs parallel. Running a commuter rail or light rail on those things would make life a lot less miserable trying to get around the city.
- hopelite 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - mlavrent 1y ago
    > it exposes that it really was never about emissions or combustion or pollution, you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement This isn’t the problem- the real problem is that in dense cities, transporting everyone where they want to go via private vehicles just doesn’t work geometrically- see the traffic and parking needs that grow as cities grow assuming private vehicle use only.You end up needing a more space-efficient form of moving people, namely public transit.
    - holowoodman 1y ago
      Public transit also doesn't scale. Germany, during the Covid years, introduced a cheap country-wide flat fee ticket (~50 bucks per month, all you can ride) for public transit. Which lead to road traffic going down measurably. Which lead to trains and busses being packed, people traveling more and farther on those. Leading to higher cost, degraded service and packed bus stations and rail lines. Building more of those isn't possible geometrically as well, cities are already packed. We are currently, at tremendous cost and effort, moving railway lines and stations underground, like Stuttgart 21, for that reason. The point is, moving people inherently is bad. Shifting from cars to public transit reduces the badness a little, but you still need infrastructure that scales O(p * s * f), where p is the number of people, s is the average distance travelled per journey, and f is the frequency of journeys. Scaling doesn't change the slightest bit with public transit, you just have a different constant factor which is irrelevant for scalability. So the solution isn't public transit. It is the avoidance of any unnecessary travel, meaning that we actually need something like a tax on non-home-office jobs and stores that you personally have to visit (as opposed to shopping online). We need better delivery infrastructure so people don't need to travel. We need close-to-home shopping options. Because actually moving goods instead of people scales logarithmically, the network of countrywide, regional, local distribution centers, bigger shops, smaller shops behaves like a tree.
theturtle 1y ago
...it would also completely fuck any remaining Amtrak traffic that isn't on Amtrak-owned track. Norfolk Southern already routinely ignores the actual on-the-books law that prioritizes passenger traffic over freight, and UP isn't much better out west. BNSF we'll just ignore.
stockresearcher 1y ago
The cynical take is that two public company CEOs have run out of ideas for further stock growth and are looking for anything else that will juice the share price in the short term. Neither company is so inefficient that you can save much of anything by combining the two, and there is only so far you can raise prices before customers switch to trucks or send container ships to different ports of call. With no overlapping territory, you aren't going to cut the number of trains you run and you can't get rid of half your maintenance staff (can you?). Investment banks will do well running the merger and surely they'll issue debt to finance it. But what kind of growth can we really expect?
woodruffw 1y ago
These articles are a good reminder of a bittersweet truth: the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants[1]; we just choose not to use it to benefit travelers. That isn't to say that we need a system that's as good as most European countries have; having these railroad companies follow the laws around Amtrak's priority would be a good start[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_Un... [2]: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/HostRailroadReports/mythbusters-enforcing-amtraks-legal-right-to-preference.pdf https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
- nocoiner 1y ago
  It was also paid for by ripping the face of 19th century bondholders who went bust many, many times.
- jcranmer 1y ago
  > the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants Note that only a small portion of the US rail network was built with land grants, about 18k miles out of ~250k miles in the peak of the US rail network. Also, most of the land-grant railroads are in the Western states, which is actually generally the least-dense portion of the rail network (in large part because the population density of that area is quite low--which is a large part of the reason for the land grants in the first place!).
  - woodruffw 1y ago
    That's true, but I'd argue that the land grants are what made it economically worthwhile to develop and maintain the denser parts of the network. You correctly observe that the network itself tracks with population density, but the value of the network is in its completeness: it wouldn't be nearly as valuable if there was a 1000 mile hole in it in the middle of the country.
    - jcranmer 1y ago

73 points by throw0101c 1y ago

Wikipedia has a combined map of UP & NS, for some reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Union_Pacific_and_Norfolk_Southern_Railroads.webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Union_Pacific_and_Norfolk...

gs17 1y ago
And ethanol plants, which I was surprised to find out is actually a big deal for rail (or rail is a big deal for ethanol?). I guess I never put much thought into how much of it was being produced and how it was being moved around. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_railNA_a_EPOOXE_RAIL_mbbl_m.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_railNA_a_EPOOXE_RAIL_m...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wombatpm 1y ago
  Chemical plants in general have rail spurs to move products out and raw materials in.
- reactordev 1y ago
  Most industrial plants have rail connections to move bulk materials. It’s more economical than trucks for some stuff. Chemicals, crude oil, cut lumber, all cheaper by rail than by truck - though trucks haul 65%+ of goods in America, they are often used for last mile for those materials.

bell-cot 1y ago

I'd regard Trains magazine as experts in the industry. That said, they're obviously reluctant to criticize the larger railroads.

echelon 1y ago

Welp, there goes the brand new HQ that Norfolk Southern built in Atlanta...

zieski 1y ago
More likely the UP headquarters in Omaha, just like Enron moving Northern Natural Gas to Houston

qwerty456127 1y ago

Let them run the railroad, let others run the trains.

CGMthrowaway 1y ago
What does this comment mean?
- cheschire 1y ago
  When one company controls both the trains AND the infrastructure, it results in an unfair advantage over anyone else wishing to use the rail. Commuter trains needing to pull over to let cargo trains from the parent company through, for example.
  - CGMthrowaway 1y ago
    I see. So you are suggesting like a Standard Oil or British Rail type breakup?
    - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      No, they're suggesting something more along the lines of Standard Oil being required to refine anyone's oil in their refinery, or carry it in their pipelines. But the one suggesting it didn't offer to let anyone stay in their house, and to me that's the same issue. Does the owner of private property get to control access and use, or not? You say that the railroad is a business, not a private residence. All right, does Home Depot have to let Lowe's use part of their floor space? No, they don't.
      - AlotOfReading 1y ago
        Property owners generally don't have complete freedom to control access, hence easements. Even if those weren't a thing, there's a coherent political view (which I'm not arguing for) that "resolves" the issue: nationalizing the infrastructure and licensing access back like the UK. It's a strawman though. There's no reason anyone needs to hold identical political views on the property rights of private houses, home improvement stores, and rail infrastructure. They're different things.

bpodgursky 1y ago

FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes. There's no real way for railroads to be be competitive unless they are fighting for the same customers (and UP/NS are not). So, the statements about improved operational efficiency are not totally implausible.

throw0101c 1y ago
> FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes. And cable companies also don't have overlapping territory, so from the consumer point of view it did not reduce competition. But from the 'other side' when there are fewer ISPs then tech companies can be squeezed because there are fewer paths to eye-balls overall and each path has more influence because instead of two ISPs have 10% of Netflix customers, now one has 20%: * https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-to-pay-comcast-for-internet-traffic https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t... Similarly with Amazon and books: while cheap consumer prices may look great, from the book publishers' perspective there's a choke point to readers, and so now the publishers have to consolidate to get market power over Amazon. And if this goes through, do you think the other Class Is will sit around? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Class_I_railroads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Class_I_railroads CSX is mostly east of the Mississippi, while BNSF is west: what about that kind of merger? Or CN or CP doing the same thing?
- bpodgursky 1y ago
  Who is the equivalent of Netflix in this relationship? You can't draw fuzzy-wuzzy analogies without actually spelling out the connection. Freight rail is not an eyeball market, the customers are the ones paying.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1y ago

polarbear67 1y ago

What's the argument for the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger [1]? Any rational admin would shoot down the merger immediately as this will create a massive monopoly. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/union-pacific-talks-advance-regulator-readies-historic-rail-merger-review-2025-07-24/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/union-pacific-talks-advance...

bpodgursky 1y ago
They share essentially zero miles of track or routes. A move only creates a monopoly if it reduces consumer choice. No freight customer is deciding "Oh I can either ship from LA to Seattle, or Miami to DC." They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage.
- liveoneggs 1y ago
  That is a big assumption on your part that east coast ports don't compete with west coast ports
- lokar 1y ago
  How about monopsony?
- throw0101c 1y ago
  > They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage. If someone on the US west coast wants to ship to the US east (or vice versa) they can pit UP against BNSF, and then NS against CSX. There are a few pairs up because of the two negotiating points: * UP-NS * UP-CSX * BNSF-NS * BNSP-CSX If the merger goes through you're now at: * merged-UPNS * BNSF-CSX Do you think UPNS will give a cheaper price for a 'half-trip' and you go to their competitor the other half? You don't think BNSF/CN/CP aren't looking at CSX right now?
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
Monopoly? No. Union Pacific plus Norfolk Southern would have a monopoly on single-line end-to-end rail service in the US, true, but that's the kind of thing that you can get a "monopoly" in. BNSF and CSX interchange with each other, after all. And BNSF and CSX could (and almost certainly would) merge in response. So there's no monopoly argument. Which doesn't mean that a rational regulator would not turn it down anyway. But rational regulators may not be running the show at the moment. UP sees that there may be an opportunity during the Trump administration. (Note "may" - nobody knows whether there is an opportunity, but there is more of a chance than there was under Biden.)

cheschire 1y ago

Any time I hear the names of train companies in America, I am always transported back a few decades, playing Rail Baron with my family. For those that have never heard of that game, please enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neWZVhmSFJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neWZVhmSFJs

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
Ticket to Ride is thought to be RB's natural successor. ref: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/94883/rail-baron-comparing-nostalgia-to-modern-favorites https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/94883/rail-baron-comparing-...
DavidPeiffer 1y ago
I think about a book I found in Texas at a thrift store. Poor's 1925 Railroad Section [1] is a thick book containing details about every (?) railroad in the US such as miles of track, tons hauled, revenue, recent mergers, etc. I'm not sure whether there is digitized data for railroad performance from the era, but it seemed like it'd be a neat dataset to assemble and research. https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Poors-1925-Railroad-Section-Unknown-Publishing/6496006524/bd https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Poors-1925-Railroad-S...

hecanjog 1y ago

Would this have an impact on Amtrak service? The trains in my area often get stopped by freight traffic, and Chicago is pretty much a mandatory change-over point. Could this allow some routes to open up connecting each side of the Mississippi more fluidly in the longer term? We got a new route (well, a new train running on a segment of an existing route, offering more flexibility for scheduling) from MSP to CHI recently, which has been great.

lokar 1y ago
I don’t see how Amtrak survives the next 3 years
- kortilla 1y ago
  What’s changed? That general sentiment has been around for the last 15-20 years but they keep plugging along.
  - lokar 1y ago
    The gridlock in Washington has been mostly resolved. The party is power can do pretty much anything. And the current party is power is against Amtrak .
    - bediger4000 1y ago
      I'm not disputing the party in power and how it hates Amtrak, but how many bills did the House pass so far this year? Gridlock got replaced with monumental Republican incompetence.
      - lokar 1y ago
        He can just replace the board, stop writing checks, or send someone to kick them out of their building. All apparently legal.
- hecanjog 1y ago

jmyeet 1y ago

Private railroads are a mistake. Let's see what the private railroad industry has done. The railroads kept reducing their workforce to get an uptick in profitability, so much so that there wasn't enough spare capacity for railroad workers to get paid sick leave of any kind. The railroad workforce were taking industrial action to get paid sick leave. What happened? Congress stepped in to use legislation to end a labor dispute for essential workers to side with the company. Oh and this was under Biden. As an aside, a later deal was made to give them a handful of paid sick days, quietly. If the railroad caved to 100% of the union's demands it would've cost 6% of the company's profits. Not revenue. Profits. The other is an industry wide effort called Precision Scheduled Railroads ("PSR"). Basically this means having trains with twice as many carriages and skipping safety chcecks because that costs money. There are over 1000 train derailments a year. Most of these aren't a big deal. Others are like East Palestine, Ohio a few years ago, which caused a toxic spill in a populated area, something that continues to be an issue [1]. A lot of toxic chemicals are transported by rail. What was insane was the media didn't report on the East Palestine derailment for a week to 10 days despite there being a black toxic plume that could be seen from space. They were finally embarrassed into covering it by social media, particularly Tiktok. All railroad companies do to maintain and increase profits is cut costs, pretty much like every other company. That means suppressing wages, skimping on maintenance and safety and not investing in fixing anything. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/05/1228772709/east-palestine-train-derailment-norfolk-southern-lawsuit-epa https://www.npr.org/2024/02/05/1228772709/east-palestine-tra...

Aloha 1y ago
They built the railroads, often on their own dime, and paid taxes by the fistful for them. Their competition was subsidized by the general government, and continues to be every year. If you want to argue that nationalizing railroads should be done for the public good, do that - dont just demonize them, because its not a fully winning argument.
- esseph 1y ago
  They spend a LOT on lobbying and politics.

alexose 1y ago

The rules that govern American railroads are impressively weird and arcane. They seem almost impossible to unravel at this point. Which is a shame, because so many American cities sacrifice the central corridors of their city to huge railyards and slow-moving freight trains. I think of Portland, Oregon, where the tracks run north/south along the river. You can see them sitting there empty while you're stuck in traffic on I-5, which runs parallel. Running a commuter rail or light rail on those things would make life a lot less miserable trying to get around the city.

hopelite 1y ago
[flagged]
- mlavrent 1y ago
  > it exposes that it really was never about emissions or combustion or pollution, you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement This isn’t the problem- the real problem is that in dense cities, transporting everyone where they want to go via private vehicles just doesn’t work geometrically- see the traffic and parking needs that grow as cities grow assuming private vehicle use only.You end up needing a more space-efficient form of moving people, namely public transit.
  - holowoodman 1y ago
    Public transit also doesn't scale. Germany, during the Covid years, introduced a cheap country-wide flat fee ticket (~50 bucks per month, all you can ride) for public transit. Which lead to road traffic going down measurably. Which lead to trains and busses being packed, people traveling more and farther on those. Leading to higher cost, degraded service and packed bus stations and rail lines. Building more of those isn't possible geometrically as well, cities are already packed. We are currently, at tremendous cost and effort, moving railway lines and stations underground, like Stuttgart 21, for that reason. The point is, moving people inherently is bad. Shifting from cars to public transit reduces the badness a little, but you still need infrastructure that scales O(p * s * f), where p is the number of people, s is the average distance travelled per journey, and f is the frequency of journeys. Scaling doesn't change the slightest bit with public transit, you just have a different constant factor which is irrelevant for scalability. So the solution isn't public transit. It is the avoidance of any unnecessary travel, meaning that we actually need something like a tax on non-home-office jobs and stores that you personally have to visit (as opposed to shopping online). We need better delivery infrastructure so people don't need to travel. We need close-to-home shopping options. Because actually moving goods instead of people scales logarithmically, the network of countrywide, regional, local distribution centers, bigger shops, smaller shops behaves like a tree.

theturtle 1y ago

...it would also completely fuck any remaining Amtrak traffic that isn't on Amtrak-owned track. Norfolk Southern already routinely ignores the actual on-the-books law that prioritizes passenger traffic over freight, and UP isn't much better out west. BNSF we'll just ignore.

stockresearcher 1y ago

The cynical take is that two public company CEOs have run out of ideas for further stock growth and are looking for anything else that will juice the share price in the short term. Neither company is so inefficient that you can save much of anything by combining the two, and there is only so far you can raise prices before customers switch to trucks or send container ships to different ports of call. With no overlapping territory, you aren't going to cut the number of trains you run and you can't get rid of half your maintenance staff (can you?). Investment banks will do well running the merger and surely they'll issue debt to finance it. But what kind of growth can we really expect?

woodruffw 1y ago

These articles are a good reminder of a bittersweet truth: the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants[1]; we just choose not to use it to benefit travelers. That isn't to say that we need a system that's as good as most European countries have; having these railroad companies follow the laws around Amtrak's priority would be a good start[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_Un... [2]: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/HostRailroadReports/mythbusters-enforcing-amtraks-legal-right-to-preference.pdf https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

nocoiner 1y ago
It was also paid for by ripping the face of 19th century bondholders who went bust many, many times.
jcranmer 1y ago
> the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants Note that only a small portion of the US rail network was built with land grants, about 18k miles out of ~250k miles in the peak of the US rail network. Also, most of the land-grant railroads are in the Western states, which is actually generally the least-dense portion of the rail network (in large part because the population density of that area is quite low--which is a large part of the reason for the land grants in the first place!).
- woodruffw 1y ago
  That's true, but I'd argue that the land grants are what made it economically worthwhile to develop and maintain the denser parts of the network. You correctly observe that the network itself tracks with population density, but the value of the network is in its completeness: it wouldn't be nearly as valuable if there was a 1000 mile hole in it in the middle of the country.
  - jcranmer 1y ago