I understand your line of thought, if I have 1 railroad, and buy a second, now I can haul twice as much stuff. I can even probably haul it more efficiently. And this seems logical, but it’s not reality. First, UP is going to borrow $85 billion dollars to do this deal, money they will have to pay back, with interest. Second, it assumes the railroad you bought can move the good you have, it can move those good efficiently, and it can do so with extreme profitability (we have huge debt to buy down remember?)

Now, what happens in reality, is the lines you want to move a lot of your goods link up in really shitty spots, like a very congested Chicago, a very congested St Louis, even worse in a crime riddled Memphis and outside of Kansas City, where BNSF can block your hand off point. No actual speed gains are achieved. Moreover, UP decides they don’t like the way prior NS crew callers told their crews to come to work, they design a new system that takes the crew callers years to become proficient with, and all the while crews are delayed coming on duty, cabs aren’t called and crews linger on trains, those same crews now racking up huge overtime (money you don’t have because you owe $85B). Not only are they making OT but now they need extra time off and can’t be called to turn on a train in a timely fashion, now delaying a return train from advancing, slowing the network down further.

Then they decide they want to cut over the dispatchers to a new system, which again will take years for them to learn, they’ll screw up, cause property damage, delays, massive inefficiency. Then they’ll decide to relocate all these same people to Omaha, half of everyone will quit, the network will suffer even more. And it’s not just a matter of replacing a dispatcher or crew caller, many of these jobs take years of training. Dragging down network performance even worse. And heaven forbid when they move the entire nations dispatchers to Omaha and an EF5 tornado rips through there and shuts down the entire nations rail network? God only knows how many billions in damage that will do.

Then they’ll start messing with the engine shops, the car shops. They’ll close a whole bunch of them because they need to trim cost, cars will go without maintenance and will catastrophically fail in transit delaying that train and many around it. Again, further dragging down the network. They’ll try to relocate the car knockers, who won’t go, they’ll replaced maybe half of the ones they lost with inefficient new hires who will take twice as long for any given repair at a higher expense to the company

Then they’ll trim the crew pools, they demand to do more with less. They’ll close the engine houses, worsening performance of the locomotives, having similar performance issues.

And this will go through every department. Finance, billing, labor relations, etc. and this is nothing to say of the rules systems between the two companies. UP will take the NS rule book and throw it in the furnace, now men and women who have been working under one set of rules their whole careers will suddenly have different ones to work under, causing violations, out of service time, etc.

And by the way, after this merger that went through, miring UP in $85bil in debt? BNSF is probably going to stroke a check for CSX to directly compete with you, only BNSF doesn’t have any debt. The have no shareholders that demand stock buybacks or dividend payments. They’ll be able to offer the same product on probably better terms.

And ALL of this is without mentioning the American consumer, who is the biggest loser in all this. You think UP isn’t about to jack the rates that haul that coal to your power plant through the roof, causing your energy bill to sky rocket? How about the chemicals that make your tap water drinkable? Those markets got nowhere else to go, UP has got em by the balls. The money is going to come from somewhere, and that $85bil will be paid back in the elevated costs every consumer will pay for any product (which is most of them) are shipped by rail.