Pedestrians approach a Union Pacific freight train traveling past Jack London Square, Oakland, California, April 26, 2026. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
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The proposed merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern is about life and death. Yes, you read that right. Which requires a brief digression.
Specifically, to Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump in 2016. Remember when partisans of both claimed the election would decide whether the U.S. went the way of Venezuela, or not?
Life or death in politics is generally a fraud, though it’s a device used by politicians and partisans alike. Elect me or my candidate to “save” the people from all manner of horrors. It’s nonsense, and it should be treated as such.
Still, with transportation it’s not partisan or emotional to say that trucks on U.S. roads bring with them a body count. Over 5,000 deaths, most of them for innocents not driving trucks, in 2023 alone.
Please keep the trucking-related deaths top of mind while reading about the ongoing, Washington-driven delays of the proposed Union Pacific merger with Norfolk Southern. Yes, there’s a death count associated with the shipment of market goods by trucks that the merger addresses. That’s because the annual body count associated with rail shipment is near non-existent.
None of which is an unwarranted attack on trucking as a mode of shipment. The latter is essential as evidenced by the fact that over three quarters of market good shipments in the U.S. are handled by trucks.
Just the same, and in the dominance of trucking as a mode of shipment, it’s easy to see that the would-be combination of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern in no way creates what’s impossible to create in a free market: a national rail monopoly. And it certainly wouldn’t create a shipping monopoly. See the previously mentioned dominance of trucking.
What the merger would create is crucial information. Specifically, how much healthier and competitive rail networks would be if they could combine their efforts and resources on the path to more seamless national, and eventually international rail networks. Knowledge like this is particularly pressing right now.
To see why, readers need only contemplate the growth of wealth around the United States at all income levels. As Peggy Noonan observed in a recent column, sometimes we need to see what we’ve grown used to seeing through the eyes of others.
Noonan was alluding to the awestruck reactions of visitors to North America, and the U.S. specifically, for the World Cup. The consensus has been that they’re very taken by just how enormously well Americans live.
How this applies to goods shipment is that as wealth grows, so will grow the movement of goods around the United States. Yes, consumption mirrors production and production stateside will continue to soar. Which means advances in goods shipment must be achieved sooner rather than later not to bring harm to the trucking industry, but to avoid the necessity of not just more trucks on roads populated with passenger vehicles, but much bigger ones.
The proposed combination of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern is ultimately an endeavor meant to discover whether rail, through fixed intercontinental routes, can shoulder what will be growing amounts of shipment throughout the United States and beyond. The answer to the latter must be discovered simply because if railroads aren’t the answer, others must be found.
As you read this, there’s a movement afoot in Washington to bring bigger, heavier, and longer trucks to America’s highways. To say that the delay of Union Pacific/Norfolk Southern is associated with these political machinations is hardly an insight. Which is tragic, along with a reminder that politics in Washington sometimes has a body count.