April 30, 2026

What the Proposed Freight Merger Could Mean for the Midwest

NS-UP freight railroad merger could affect air quality and passenger rail service in Chicago and throughout the Midwest

By Kevin Brubaker, Chief Operations Officer & Deputy Director

The United States used to have dozens of major railroads. Through consolidation, today there are just six. So, when two of them propose to merge, it’s a big deal. And it is happening now: Union Pacific (UP) and Norfolk Southern (NS) seek to merge, creating the first coast-to-coast railroad.

Why do we care? In part, because passengers depends on freight railroads. Outside the Northeast, Amtrak and many commuter trains run on tracks owned by freight railroads. That’s the deal that the railroads struck fifty years ago: Amtrak trains could run on their tracks in exchange for the freight railroads no longer being required to carry the passengers themselves. But as anyone who has ever sat in an Amtrak coach waiting for a freight train to pass knows, the relationship between freight and passenger is often fraught.

Passenger rail ridership is booming these days. Amtrak hit a record in 2025 with 34.5 million trips, and the Midwest’s 8% growth surpassed the 4% nationwide average. Amtrak’s new Borealis service between Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul far exceeded expectations, and Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are studying new rail services. ELPC is excited to see passengers embrace sustainable transportation, and we want to make sure nothing hinders further growth and flexibility.

If Amtrak wants to run more trains, though, it has to negotiate with the host railroads, who are usually resistant to complicating their own operations. If UP and NS merge, the new company would host 57% of Amtrak’s national network and have even more power in these negotiations. It’s not just Amtrak either; Metra commuter trains in Chicagoland run on four UP lines and one NS line, and Metra is hoping to run more frequent service soon, since the state passed a $1.5 billion transit bill last fall.

Air Quality and Climate Impacts

ELPC supports freight rail as a cleaner alternative to trucking. One freight train can carry the same amount of cargo as several hundred trucks, using just a fraction of the energy and creating just a fraction of the emissions. UP and NS have leaned on the environment as a reason to support the merger, saying a bigger railroad will help freight rail grow, taking trucks off the road.

But their application gave little evidence of this claim, and past mergers have demonstrated the opposite effects. In spite of railroad consolidation, railroads have continued to lose market share to trucks over the last 25 years.  Marty Oberman, the former chair of the federal Surface Transportation Board, has suggested that railroad consolidations over the past several decades led to stagnation in the market, “Monopolists act like monopolists: they raise prices and cut output.” If railroads focus more on distributing cash to shareholders than striving for growth, then railroads aren’t going to be able to compete with trucks for market share, and both the economy and environment suffer.

What About Chicago?

Chicago is the nation’s railroad hub. It’s the only place where all six major railroads converge.  Roughly 25% of all freight rail passes through Chicago. Nearly 1,300 trains come through the Chicago area every day (500 freight & 800 passenger or commuter). Amtrak’s state-supported network connects passengers from Illinois to the rest of the Midwest, and its long-distance networks connect to Washington, California, Texas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and New York. Metra carries 200,000 passengers a day to over two hundred communities in Illinois, enough to fill another eight-lane highway if everyone had to drive instead.

The impacts of this railroad merger – both good and bad — will therefore have an outsized impact on Chicago. Potential benefits include less trucks hauling intermodal boxes between freight yards, resulting in lower pollution overall and less highway congestion. On the other hand, neighborhoods could be subject to dramatically more rail traffic, delays at grade crossings, and more localized pollution. Long-term, will freight be diverted from Chicago to other locations? And, if so, is that good or bad for the region?

There’s a lot to consider. The companies just submitted a new application to the Surface Transportation Board, which had rejected their earlier application as insufficient. We look forward to digging into the new application – 7,000 pages plus 2GB of supplemental material – to learn more.