WASHINGTON (Sept 10, 2026) – The American Chemistry Council offered the following statement in response to BNSF’s September 9 filing related to the proposed UP/NS merger.
ACC opposes the UP/NS merger and believes the applicant railroads have failed to demonstrate that the proposed transaction would serve the public interest.
ACC understands that BNSF railroad also opposes the merger but has identified potential conditions to partially offset the harm if the merger is allowed to proceed. In particular, BNSF calls for the creation of a terminal railroad in the Gulf Coast region. While no conditions would be sufficient to make the merger in the public interest, ACC supports consideration of terminal railroads as potential option to address competitive harms if the STB review moves forward.
ACC and its individual members believe the proposed UP/NS merger would reduce transportation options, increase shipping costs, and harm American consumers. It would permanently damage competition in the already heavily consolidated freight rail industry and give UP/NS control of more than 6,000 single-served industry locations across the country. The effects would be particularly stark in the Gulf Coast region, where UP-NS would control more than half of all rail traffic and about 70% of chemical shipments.
BNSF has indicated that it intends to ask the STB to condition any approval of the proposed UP/NS merger on the installation of a neutral terminal railroad to directly serve all UP and BNSF rail-served customer facilities in the Gulf Coast region and to hand off traffic to UP and BNSF. This would allow both railroads to compete for the rail transportation needs of the ACC’s members in the region.
The BNSF proposal points to the need for broad structural changes to both preserve and strengthen rail competition if the proposed merger is approved. In contrast, UP and NS have proposed only a temporary gateway pricing scheme that fails to provide new competitive options for existing rail customers.
We appreciate BNSF’s contributions to address the application’s lack of substance. It is critical for STB to consider such transformational conditions for any merger of this size and scale.
