Cracks in the Coalition: Meridian Pullout Exposes Soft Underbelly of UP/NS Merger Support
A small Mississippi rail town just told regulators its endorsement was borrowed, not earned — and the timing could hardly be worse for the railroads
For a year, Union Pacific (UP) and Norfolk Southern (NS) have pointed to a mountain of endorsements — roughly 2,000 letters from elected officials, businesses and civic groups — as proof that America wants the first true transcontinental railroad. Now one of those letters is walking out the door, and the words it left behind may sting more than the departure itself.
“Currently, we are not comfortable continuing to allow [Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern] to include our letters as statements of support for benefits they have yet to substantiate,” the City of Meridian, Mississippi, said in withdrawing its backing for the $85 billion combination.
Read that sentence twice. The operative word is “substantiate” — and it is precisely the word hanging over the entire proceeding at the Surface Transportation Board (STB). When the Board conditionally accepted the railroads’ revised application on May 28 (Docket FD 36873), it did not shower the deal with praise. It held the proceeding in abeyance and demanded supplemental information — due July 27 — on exactly the questions Meridian is now raising: how, specifically, the merger enhances competition; what happens to shippers who lose a railroad option; and how the applicants’ claimed benefits, including $3.5 billion in annual shipper savings and 88,000 new county-to-county connections, hold up under scrutiny.
In other words, a city of about 33,000 people just told the STB, in plain English, what the Board’s own information requests imply in regulatory language: the benefits case has been asserted, not proven.
Key milestones in STB Docket FD 36873. Graphic: staff analysis of STB filings and news reports.
Why Meridian, of all places, matters
Meridian is not a random dot on the map. It is the eastern anchor of the Meridian Speedway, the 320-mile fast freight corridor to Shreveport, Louisiana, that Canadian Pacific Kansas City operates and in which Norfolk Southern holds a longstanding stake. It is the junction where UP-NS interline traffic between the Southeast and Texas actually changes hands — and where the merger’s operational promises meet reality.
Reality has been messy. Last September, UP and NS themselves complained to the STB that CPKC’s service on the Speedway had deteriorated, with UP objecting to an 8,500-foot train-length limit. The Board dismissed those petitions on March 13. Whatever the merits, the episode put on public display the kind of interline friction — and service risk — that a town built around a rail junction lives with daily. When that town says it is no longer comfortable vouching for unsubstantiated benefits, regulators are likely to notice.
UP and NS state footprints; Meridian sits where NS’s network meets the CPKC-operated Meridian Speedway to Shreveport. Graphic: staff analysis of UP/NS network data.
There is precedent for defection, and it stung the applicants before. In December 2025, two of the largest rail unions — the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes — yanked their support and joined the opposition through the Teamsters Rail Conference. The Meridian withdrawal extends the pattern from labor to local government, the constituency the railroads’ letter-writing campaign was built to showcase. Bloomberg Government reported the campaign supplied allies with messaging templates emphasizing “improved service reliability” and “reduced transit times.” Template support is cheap to gather — and, as Meridian just demonstrated, cheap to lose. Every withdrawal invites the STB to discount the stack of letters that remains.
The agriculture stakes: leverage, not logistics
For farm country, this fight was never about route maps; it is about leverage. American Farm Bureau Federation delegates voted in January to oppose the merger outright, and AFBF’s analysis explains why: roughly 95% of grain elevators are served by a single railroad, and a combined UP-NS would originate about 44% of carloads across major commodities and more than a third of all U.S. grain movements. Rail tariffs on corn, soybeans and wheat rose 10% to 50% over 2015-2025, and STB data show railroads’ farm-product revenue above variable cost more than doubled from $1.08 billion in 2004 to $2.44 billion in 2023. “This merger would lead to greater consolidation and higher costs when farmers are already hard-pressed,” AFBF President Zippy Duvall warned.
The National Grain and Feed Association objected on May 8 that the application still fails to explain how the merged carrier would manage service disruptions and coordinate with rivals in a crisis — the nightmare scenario for grain shippers with harvest on the ground. And the Soy Transportation Coalition’s Mike Steenhoek has distilled the legal test the railroads must meet under the STB’s tougher 2001 merger rules: “It doesn’t need to maintain competition; it needs to enhance competition.”
Ag groups now sit alongside BNSF, CPKC, the American Chemistry Council, the Teamsters and others in the Stop the Rail Merger Coalition formed in April, with the Agricultural Retailers Association joining in May. Seven state attorneys general — from farm states including Iowa, Kansas and the Dakotas — and 47 House Republicans have separately urged skepticism, the latter telling the STB to find “real” benefits or reject the deal.
What to watch
The railroads are not standing still. On July 7 they filed the first tranche of their supplemental responses, pledging to divest their stakes in the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis and Kansas City Terminal Railway to blunt claims they could squeeze rivals at key gateways — while accusing opponents of using the St. Louis terminal “as a pawn.” The second, harder tranche — substantiating the enhanced-competition case — is due July 27. Once the Board lifts the abeyance, it has signaled a roughly 12-month evidentiary clock, putting a decision in late 2027, with slippage toward 2028 plausible. The companies still publicly target a 2027 close; their merger agreement runs to January 28, 2028, with extensions.
The support ledger is not empty. SMART-TD, the largest rail union, backs the deal on the strength of negotiated job guarantees. Deep South Democrats Bennie Thompson, Troy Carter and Cleo Fields have written in favor, as have Nebraska’s senators and major intermodal customer Hub Group. But the burden of proof under the 2001 rules sits squarely on the applicants — and the currency of that proof is credibility.
That is why a short letter from Meridian punches above its weight. The city did not claim the merger will harm it. It said something more corrosive to the applicants’ case: that it was asked to vouch for benefits nobody has yet demonstrated. If more of the 2,000 letter-writers reach the same conclusion between now and the evidentiary phase, UP and NS will find themselves defending not just their traffic studies but the authenticity of their public support. Watch the docket after July 27. Meridian may be the first city to ask for its name back. The railroads’ task is to make sure it is the last.
