In 1869, the first-ever American transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, then in the Utah Territory. Passengers and cargo from the industrial cities of the Northeast could make the steam-powered one-week journey toward the West Coast, stretching the American frontier and settling the West.
Nearly 160 years later, highway systems and airplanes have taken over as the primary means of transportation for passengers across the nation, but a significant amount of cargo and freight still moves by rail, albeit through a complex system of network changes and handoffs. Over time, the myriad of rules, regulations, and competing rail lines have grown more complex, leading to a status quo that covertly costs households at the grocery store, the hardware aisle, and the gas pump every day.
The “affordability” debate in America has only temporarily taken a backseat to foreign policy concerns within Congress, and as the midterm elections inch closer, expect to see a return to the No. 1 issue among voters in 2026. The tough truth about affordability is that much of the downward pressure on prices is structural and baked into sectors such as rail transportation.
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The proposed merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern can address it.
Together, the two networks would form the first single-network transcontinental freight rail line in American history. This would allow a container to leave the Port of Los Angeles and roll into Norfolk, Virginia, without a single handoff to another carrier. The Surface Transportation Board, the federal regulator overseeing the deal, should let it through.
The numbers alone should give cause. Trucks moved more than 70% of U.S. freight in 2024, even though rail remains significantly cheaper per ton-mile for long-distance hauls. The reason isn’t that shippers prefer to pay more. It’s that America’s freight rail map is stitched together from regional networks that hand cargo off mid-journey, with each crew swap, paperwork transfer, and yard delay tacking another cost onto the box of cereal or a bag of fertilizer at checkout.
A unified UP-NS network would shift roughly 2 million truckloads a year from highway to rail. That amounts to a wholesale rerouting of how American goods move: fewer 18-wheelers grinding down interstates, fewer choke points in the supply chain, and lower transit costs on the products families buy every week. On key corridors, shipments from Southern California to the Northeast could see transit times drop by nearly 20 hours. Time is money, and when you save time, consumers pay less.
Critics will reach for the usual antitrust playbook and claim consolidation kills competition. They have it backward, considering the relevant competition here isn’t Union Pacific against Norfolk Southern. The two networks barely overlap, which is precisely why an end-to-end merger is appropriate.
The real competition is rail against trucking, ocean shipping, and air freight.
American freight rail has been losing that contest for decades because it was regulated like an 18th-century technology and structured like a patchwork quilt. A coast-to-coast network puts rail back in the fight, and intermodal competition is what actually drives prices down for shippers and consumers.
There is also a resilience argument that anyone who lived through the last five years should appreciate. Pandemics, port strikes, Houthi missiles in the Red Sea, and squeezed energy markets have made every link in the supply chain a potential point of failure. Building a second spine for American freight, one that doesn’t depend on a single corridor or a single mode, is exactly the kind of redundancy a serious country builds before the next disruption, not after.
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The STB’s job is to evaluate whether this merger benefits consumers. It does. The board has every right to attach conditions that protect agricultural shippers, guarantee service continuity, and preserve open access for short-line railroads where it matters. It should use those tools, then sign off and get out of the way. STB shouldn’t treat market consolidation as automatically suspect when the alternative is a status quo that hands 70% of American freight to the most expensive option on the menu.
Consumers don’t care whether their flour arrives on one railroad or two. They care that it arrives, on time, at a price they can pay. That’s the deal Washington can deliver by simply getting out of the way.
Yael Ossowski is deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center and author of “The Consumer Case for Reimagining and Innovating Railroad Policy.”