Though the best-known tactic in the game of Monopoly is to capture all the locations of the same color — thereby gaining an eponymous monopoly — and throw a bunch of houses and hotels on them.
But it's no less serviceable is capturing all the railroads. If your opponent has just one railroad, it costs only $25 when you land on it, but if they get all four, and you cough up $200 — eight times as much!
Railway mergers in the real world aren't as clean, but they're just as scary for those of us who’d like to ride on them.
The Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern Railway proposed merger is one that would scare even Mr. Monopoly himself.
The Surface Transportation Board must take a hard look at this merger to see is really in the public interest.
The regulatory agency can approve a merger when it deems it "consistent with the public interest," which occurs — according to federal regulations — only when substantial and demonstrable gains in important public benefits, including safety, outweigh any anticompetitive effects and other possible merger-related harms.
Not only does safety have to be improved with a merger, but the safety scale must be tipped dramatically so that it overcomes anticompetitive and service disruption concerns.
If they are combined, a Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger would be responsible for transporting more than 40% of the nation’s rail freight rail and employing nearly half of U.S. railroad workers covered by collective bargaining.
This doesn't pass the smell test, and probably not the Herfindahl Hirschman Index either.
There may be some benefits to a "seamless" railroad spanning the country if Union Pacific railroad and Norfolk Southern merge, though this is hardly going to be a transcontinental railroad, Golden Spike moment.
Let's set aside that many of those same benefits could be achieved through partnerships and collaboration, something the apparently contented railroads have not really leaned into historically.
The fact is that a key consideration that the Surface Transportation Board must evaluate as the regulatory agency reviewing this proposal is whether such a merger would be in the "public interest."
Safe railroad operations matter so thousands of rail employees return to their families at the end of a shift, as can all the people living in the many communities across the country through which freight and passenger trains operate.
So far, safety hasn't been part of the debate, because it serves as a substantial benchmark in a merger decision.
Safety should be priority No. 1.
The statistics demand strict scrutiny of this potential merger.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is the agency tasked with ensuring safe operations of the nation's railroads through regulatory and inspection responsibilities.
The FRA levied safety fines totaling nearly $8 million against Union Pacific in 2024, far more than the second ranking U.S. railroad in safety penalties — which happens to be Norfolk Southern.
In the last six and five years, respectively, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern have ranked first and second for safety penalties issued by the FRA.
After undertaking a safety audit of all the big railroads, in an unprecedented step, FRA halted its audit of Union Pacific after finding the railroad was accused of being less than transparent.
FRA said there was "widespread evidence" that the integrity of the assessment was jeopardized because UP employees, afraid of retaliation, didn’t provide complete responses to the safety interviews.
The short-circuited safety review was initiated for all railroads by FRA following the disastrous derailment at East Palestine, Ohio, by the very partner in this planned merger: Norfolk Southern.
An investigation into that derailment by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that Norfolk Southern officials provided incomplete, misleading information resulting in the decision by local responders to "vent and burn" the hazardous vinyl chloride in the derailed tank cars.
Such tactics are to be used as a last resort, and the federal investigation found several factors should have led to other actions that day.
During the investigation, the chair of the NTSB called Norfolk Southern "unconscionable" and "reprehensible."
Since then, the small community of East Palestine has suffered from the company's bad behavior. Finally, Norfolk Southern and its activist shareholders — who agitated for this merger in order to juice the stock price and reap a $15 billion "merger premium" payout —then went along quietly with railroad industry efforts to slow rail safety legislation pending in Congress.
Remember, the game Monopoly was a warning against monopolies.
Before the public and eventually the STB weigh whether the merger of these two railroads is a good idea we have to know if this proposal is about serving the public’s interest, or simply about serving the interests of Wall Street activist investors.
If they can't put safety first, they don't get to pass go.
(A related story may be found here.)
Jared Whitley is a longtime politico who has worked in the U.S. Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult business school in Dubai. In 2024 he won the Top of the Rockies Best Columnist award. Read Jared Whitley's Reports — More Here.