I’ve Heard Enough – This Merger Doesn’t Kill Competition. It Unlocks It.

To Our Customers:

Since we announced our merger with Norfolk Southern, our opponents have been vocal. As expected, they’ve gotten louder with the acceptance of our application. I’ve listened to all the rhetoric and I’ve had enough.

The critics have a convenient story: The Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger will stifle competition and leave you with fewer choices and higher rates. They tell it with great confidence. There’s just one problem — it’s wrong. And we don’t have to argue about it in the abstract, because we just lived through it.

When the Surface Transportation Board (STB) approved the Canadian Pacific – Kansas City Southern (CPKC) deal, cross-border rail choices changed overnight. A single-line network suddenly tied Canada, the United States and Mexico – a real, formidable new competitor in lanes many of you depend on every single day.

The CPKC merger didn’t just make CPKC better; Union Pacific stepped up to compete and delivered real benefits for our customers.

Union Pacific responded immediately to the new competition. Within about a week of the STB approval, Union Pacific and Grupo México increased our service at Eagle Pass, and we’ve never let up. In 2025, we launched international crews with Grupo México, further improving capacity and fluidity at the gateway. Since 2023, Union Pacific’s gateway volume is up over 5% with Mexico.

Customers won in other ways as well.  CPKC immediately became a strong competitor and we had to fight hard to compete. In full transparency, we lost business. For example, we had just secured Schneider National, a very strategic account, but with the CPKC merger, they shifted their Mexico business away from us. We responded by adjusting our pricing to compete with CPKC’s single line service, delivering more competitive value to customers. 

Competition pushed us, and you, the customer, came out ahead. That’s not a theory. That’s history…very recent history.

Now we find ourselves at another inflection point. Our proposed merger with Norfolk Southern will create the first transcontinental railroad in U.S. history: a single-line network from the Pacific to the Atlantic, under one operating plan, eliminating interchanges that today add 24 to 48 hours and real cost to your supply chain. At the heart of our application are seven new premium intermodal trains running seven days a week, connecting western origins to eastern markets and six new manifest trains that will create faster, more reliable, lower-cost options for traffic that moving to, from, and across the watershed region.

And here’s the part the critics don’t want to talk about. The moment we announced the merger, others in the industry responded — fast and exactly as we expected. The instant a stronger Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern combination was proposed, we saw new lanes and new services from our competitors. Our competitors can see plainly that the only way to answer seamless, single-line service and streamlined customer experience is to get faster, get cheaper or both. That costs them money and dents their bottom line – so of course they’re going to fight a railroad that is harder for them to match. Their opposition isn’t evidence our merger will harm competition. It’s the clearest proof that competition is alive and accelerating. We welcome this increased competition; in fact, we intend to keep leading it.

Here is my commitment to you. As we move through the regulatory review and integration planning, Union Pacific will keep investing – in the network, in the service products and in the people who earned your business in the first place. We look forward to the day we provide you a single-line transcontinental product. Until then, we will continue to deliver a strong service product and customer experience. Thank you for the business.

Sincerely,

Kenny Rocker
Executive Vice President, Marketing & Sales