On May 10, 1869, workers drove a golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, and the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific. For the first time, freight could cross the country by rail. More than 150 years later, shockingly it still can't do so on a single railroad.
Freight moving between the East and the West today has to change hands, usually in Chicago or another interchange point in the middle of the country. Those handoffs can add 24 to 48 hours, according to the companies. A railcar waiting in a yard earns nothing. The shipper pays for the inventory sitting inside it, and eventually so do the rest of us.
The proposed merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern would fix that. It would create the first single-line railroad from coast to coast, and it would be built with private capital. No federal grant money to get it done or no new program out of D.C. Two companies are putting their own money at risk because they think they can serve customers better and earn a return doing it. That is the profit motive at work, and it has built more American infrastructure than any government program ever will.
The timing for what they are trying to accomplish in this deal matters. Diesel averaged more than $6.50 a gallon in late September, up nearly 74 percent from a year ago, according to the Energy Information Administration. Trucking companies are passing those costs along, and families see it at the grocery store.
Rail moves freight using far less fuel per ton than trucks do and is a way to help see savings for those who do ship goods by rail. The problem is that on long cross-country moves, rail loses business to trucks because the handoffs make it slower and less reliable. The companies estimate that shifting freight from long-haul trucking to the combined railroad would save shippers $3.5 billion annually. Faster, more dependable service gives shippers a real reason to choose trains, and trucking companies will have to compete harder for every load.
Voters seem to understand this. A Guidant Polling & Strategy survey of 2,000 likely general election voters nationwide, conducted April 8 to 14, 2026, found that 55 percent supported the proposal after hearing a basic description. Twenty-three percent opposed it, and 22 percent were unsure. Support outpaced opposition by more than two to one.
Three-quarters of respondents rated freight rail as very important for transporting goods and supporting the American economy. The poll likewise found that Americans see this merger as improving affordability, with that being the leading benefit respondents identified.
So who's against it? Mostly people who believe bigness is a crime on its face or competitors fearful of having to step up their own game to win customers.
That idea has had a long run in Washington lately. Antitrust enforcers have spent recent years treating mergers as suspect by default, measuring success by how many deals they could slow down or kill rather than whether consumers ended up better off. Prices didn't come down because of it. Fraud didn't stop. The main product was paperwork and legal fees and government playing a bigger and bigger role in all of our lives.
Antitrust law was meant to protect consumers, not to protect competitors from having to keep up. The right question for any merger is simple: Will customers pay less and get better service? Here the evidence points one way. More than 500 customers have formally supported the merger, according to Union Pacific. These are the businesses that theoretically would be hurt if the combined railroad abused its position, and they are asking regulators to approve it. Seven unions, including the largest rail labor union, have endorsed it too, and the companies project about 1,200 net new union jobs by the third year as they grow as a result of their new network.
Railroads also don't compete only with each other. They compete with trucks, barges and pipelines every day. A railroad that raises prices or lets service slip hands that freight straight to the highway.
The Surface Transportation Board has the job of reviewing this deal, and it should do that job thoroughly. Hold the companies to their commitments. But the board shouldn't load the approval with so many conditions that it strips out the efficiencies that make the merger worth doing. A slow-walked, hedged-to-death approval would leave shippers and families paying for the delay.
The men at Promontory Summit connected a continent. Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are offering to finish the job. The board should let them.
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