- A few years ago, I wrote a long piece about why NS wanted to bulldoze part of a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side to expand an intermodal yard. homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2023/07/18/c...
- (Tl;dr, the operational coordination issues that result from the fragmented ownership and middling ambitions of the US freight rail network makes trucking rail cargo from one rail yard to another in Chicago a load-bearing element of goods movement in this country)Dec 20, 2025 19:41
- Anyway, yesterday UP and NS filed their merger application, or in other words a proposal to reduce that fragmentation. Whether or not the merger is a good idea is quite the fraught question (I come down on the "yes" side with some major reservations), but...
- ...you really could not have asked for a more perfect illustration of how fundamentally *institutional* this problem is. In their merger app, they estimate they'll eliminate ~350 truck transfers a day from Chicago, or about 120-130k/year.
- Thanks to that reduction (plus some other factors), the combined UP + NS projects they'll be able to close two of their Chicago-area intermodal yards, Yard Center and 63 St.
- This is to say: had this merger happened a few years ago, the capacity pressure that required bulldozing housing in the first place would not have existed. It's incredible what re-configuring institutional incentives can do to the material world.
