Also, railroads are already monopoly, it’s not like anyone can lay down new tracks, and operators aren’t required to allow 3rd parties on their networks…
They may be a monopoly in their regions but this would be the first time in a long while we had the same name coast to coast.
The fastest Mandelbrot rendering algorithm, using a perturbation method, was developed by a guy from there.
It's smaller than Pfizer buying Warner-Lambert in 1999. It's smaller (at least inflation adjusted) than Exxon-Mobil or Citicorp-Travelers. It's a lot smaller than AOL-Time Warner in 2000. It's smaller than Dow-duPont in 2015.
Why is it outlandish? Because it involves railroads?
It'd be like privatizing the roads and then allowing the closure of the small farm roads because they're "not profitable". It'd be massively short sighted and would cause problems for decades, maybe over a century as we sort things out and get back on track. It's what we're in the middle of with railroads.
Second, railroads are more efficient at hauling stuff longer distances. They are not more efficient at local pick up and delivery, though. Letting trucks take over that part makes things more efficient, not less. Your "closure of small farm roads" analogy is therefore off base.
I can understand mergers being blocked by regulators, but what powers do unions have? What was the last time a merger was blocked by an union?
Ensuring full utilization of Positive Train Control could allow a lot more traffic (including a lot more passenger rail, and make it a first class citizen of the rails) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
Edit: one problematic impact is drastically higher traffic along the single line joining the networks that runs through Dubuque, Iowa.
Having a nationwide network absolutely lets you compete with networks that are more regional "If you want to use our western routes you have to use us in the east too."
> larger network would make things more efficient for shippers
LOL
> goods can travel coast to coast without changing trains
They already can.
I'm not a railroad expert, but here's the exact quote from the article, which cites a consultancy:
>Going from coast to coast is a greater prize. Avoiding interchanges between networks would mean faster trains and fewer delays. According to Oliver Wyman, a consultancy, the share of intermodal goods in America that travel by rail on journeys longer than 1,500 miles increases from 39% to 65% when served by a direct line. Transcontinental railways would mean fewer lengthy stops in Chicago and may make shorter routes near the Mississippi river more profitable.
Maybe Oliver Wyman is on the payroll of UP/Norfolk and this isn't true, but I'd like to see something more reputable than a HN comment of 1-3 word refutations.
Additionally, it probably still wouldn't be possible for most origins and destinations from going coast to coast without interchange because will probably have to use shortline tracks at some point, like the Chicago Belt Railway.
Nobody is talking about taking boxes out of one car and putting them on another, but it seems pretty self-evident that the entire train itself would get broken up multiple times on a cross-country trip.
There are reasonable people who think this merge would be good, and reasonable people who think it would be bad, and perhaps we can discuss pros and cons without acting like asses?
So here is a map of who owns the railways so we can ascertain who would be affected by the merger.
https://stb.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap...
I think this is bad becasue it will kill CSX as their lines will be less used for cross country deliveries.
CSX already had ana anti-trust suite against Norfolk which was rejected during this administration.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/supreme-court-wont-hear-cs...
No there aren't, unless you interpret "good" as "good for extracting monopoly prices from the people". The US economy is overly monopolized as it is even without this buyout.
More importantly, no reasonable person would skip the $85 Billion (with B) price tag which is a definite proof of my words above.
Why is $85B automatically bad? Is it just because it's a large sum of money?
I didn't say automatically, I referred to "my words above" - that kind of money, and the profits on top of it, can only come from monopoly pricing and it's a strong sign that the business in question is operating in near monopoly conditions.
In most of the world, railroads (and other roads) are government owned because it's hard to make that kind of business competitive plus there are natsec issues to address. The privatization trend is recent.
In many parts of the world, railroads were originally private enterprises. The US is perhaps exceptional here in that they never nationalized theirs.
So according to you, I somehow stated that disagreement with me makes somebody unreasonable, and in support of that you provided... a fictional quote. Your strawman isn't simply unreasonable, it's aggressively dishonest.
> "and instead must be mustache-twirling villains" is certainly an interesting take.
Now you offer hallucinations about "mustache-twirling villains"... Do you have something, anything, reasonable to say? Like address the topic? $85 Billion with a B? Did you forget about it?
Peaceful disagreement DOES NOT make an argument reasonable. Are you going to argue about that too?
> No there aren't
You did state that disagreement makes you unreasonable.
No, I didn't, and there's no such claim in the words you so selectively quoted. Outside of that, I used the specific facts of the case to show that it's unreasonable to call the merge good.
Trump was just shaking them down. He was never going to actually fight money.
How many people on HN do you think were around so that they could vote for Nixon in 1968?
Regan really is the beginning of all of this.
I mean CPKC might be the excuse, but that's not the same thing...
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2025/berkshire-bnsf-ba...
This comment caught me off guard with how blatantly VC-sycophantic it is.
For employees it means waiting 15-20 years for a payday. How many people can take such a big risk, going half their career underpaid waiting for their options to become something? Companies are meanwhile forced to raise capital that isn’t from the public stock exchanges and that can also go on only for so long. Meanwhile you have these giant companies like Google or whatever who can just copy your great idea/business and throw money or people at it, eventually killing you before you get to exit. Look at how Microsoft abused their Office sales contracts to give away Teams to kill Slack. Eventually that forced Slack to sell to Salesforce.
I guess I view it as chicken and egg. If the huge mega corp companies were broken up or heavily regulated maybe smaller companies wouldn’t need mergers and acquisitions as much because they would be more stable in a fair competitive environment.
But I’m not an expert in any of this. I’ve just seen others talk about all this when lurking on this website.
I don't think this is accurate.
People are chomping at the bit to invest into private companies through Tokens on Robinhood. Private companies do not want to deal with accountability so they remain private.
> I guess I view it as chicken and egg. If the huge mega corp companies were broken up or heavily regulated maybe smaller companies wouldn’t need mergers and acquisitions as much because they would be more stable in a fair competitive environment.
If you didn't allow small companies like Skype to sell to Microsoft then there wouldn't be a Teams to bully Salesforce.
It seems like companies that are getting similar levels of hype to what Netscape and Google did could go public, but don’t want to, or not yet, anyway. I find it hard to believe that Anthropic or Stripe wouldn’t have successful IPO’s.
But why do they deserve a payday? If the public markets aren't willing to buy in to IPOs at the given IPO sale price, then perhaps the company isn't valued at the funding rounds valuations that only come from a small handful of investors?
Saying people don’t deserve an exit is saying startups shouldn’t even exist? At some point every company provides liquidity whether it’s stock sales, dividends, merger, etc.
Because it is, and always has been, profit over product (and people).
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/union-pacific-corp/summary?...
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/csx-corp/summary?id=D000000...
In other words, the companies have agreed to merge, but regulators will still have to approve.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/10/...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/06/...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-ftc-accuses-intuit-decep...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/06/...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/08/...
I see no actual change here.
I think she correctly identified corporate consolidation, collusion and legally entrenched middlemen as a threat to the working class and economic competitiveness.
Her record wasn't 100% wins but I think she was setting the stage for a much more impactful 4 years had Biden or Harris won.
I think she was one of the reasons big tech and oligarchs fell into line for Trump. Now we're stuck with the most openly corrupt and transactional corporate administration in US history.
A good interview on her philosophy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/opinion/lina-khan-monopol...