Union Pacific CEO Channels Lincoln to Sell Coast-to-Coast Deal
It doesn’t take Jim Vena long to bring up Honest Abe.
Two of the locomotives decked out there recently are numbers 1616 and 4547, as in, presidents Abraham Lincoln and
Union Pacific is pursuing a merger with
Still, that was the joining of two railroads, not the creation of one. Combining with Norfolk Southern, he told federal regulators, “gives our country the chance to complete Abraham Lincoln’s original vision of a single, seamless coast-to-coast railroad.”
But to realize his vision, Vena needs to get the deal through the Surface Transportation Board, an independent regulator that might pack more power per bureaucratic pound than any agency in the federal government. Despite having a majority of members appointed by Trump, the board rejected the first, nearly 7,000-page merger application filed by the two railroads on technical grounds, then demanded more documents ahead of the planned April 30 refiling.
As the public face of the deal after almost 50 years in railroading, this is Vena’s chance to apply everything from being a brakeman to a marketing guy in pursuit of the biggest deal of them all. “You go through life looking for opportunity to actually use all the skill set that you have and everything that you’ve been taught,” he said at a November conference in New York City ahead of the Dec. 19 filing of the first application.
A true transcontinental railroad would speed deliveries, open new markets in the heartland, force other railroads to compete on price, and even make America more competitive against China, Vena and his boosters say. Those backers include Trump, whom Vena seemed to have won over at a White House visit in September. “Sounds good to me,” Trump said of the merger. “Union Pacific is a great railroad.”
The deal has powerful opponents: competitor railroads, one led by an old rival of Vena’s; many rail customers; and the two railroads’ largest labor unions, who argue the deal would buckle supply chains, jeopardize rail safety and cost jobs. Opponents led by the American Chemistry Council, whose members include
The Omaha-based Union Pacific, meanwhile, donated an undisclosed amount to Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing to construct a ballroom, though Vena denies it was related to the deal.
As the only major freight railroad CEO with experience from the ground up, Vena claims a unique ability to remake railroading less dependent on commodity shippers and more competitive against trucking. Critics see another motivation at work.
“It’s been this way throughout railroad history,” Dan Bostek, a former Norfolk Southern executive and consultant, said. “Ego drives a lot of action.”
‘What the Heck’s a Brakeman?
Vincenzo James Vena was born in 1958 in Malito, a town with “no hospital, no nothing” inside the toe of the Italian boot. His father worked stone, then construction in southern France. A general manager told him about railroading in Alberta, Canada, a common destination for Italian immigrants of the era, so his family, two boys and a wife, came with him to a little town called Jasper.
His father got a job with
Creosote, a toxic preservative derived from coal tar, covered his clothes after throwing rail ties that first day. He cleaned passenger cars the next summer.
He kept the summer jobs going after he entered the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he studied math. Then, he encountered a general manager while walking down the street.
“You ever thought of being a brakeman?”
“What the heck’s a brakeman?”
“Well, you get on the trains, you ride out with the trains, you switch cars to customers.”
The money was twice what he made before, so he began moonlighting on weekends. That meant leaving school Friday afternoon, driving four hours in his 1967 Ford Galaxie 500 to Jasper, and getting back to Edmonton for a couple hours’ sleep before Monday morning classes. “Bang, bang, bang” as he remembers. He gave a buddy’s sister a ride home to Jasper one weekend. They’ve now been married 42 years.
“I never was going to be a locomotive engineer or a brakeman or a conductor forever, because I would have been bored,” he says. “But I could see the business and see what the railroad was a little bit more being out on trains. And I thought, ‘You know, I might be able to build a career out of this and still finish my degree.’”
And so in 1979, degree in hand with zero debt, he stayed on at Canadian National full-time and wouldn’t leave for almost 40 years.
He pulled pins and tied brakes in rail yards at first. He became a conductor, then a locomotive engineer.
“I’m not bragging, it’s just because of the background,” he says after he exits a train cab inside the shop. “But if you asked another CEO in the industry: tell me how the brake system works on red cars, the service portion, and the emergency portion, and the emergency portion is 1.5 times bigger than the service portion, and the amount of air that goes in ends up with 2.5 times more pressure than what you had because of the size, they wouldn’t know it. That’s what I was taught 40 years ago.”
He became a yardmaster overseeing trains and crews. He worked in marketing and sales. He negotiated union contracts. Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal, Saskatoon, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Chicago were stops along the way.
A big idea would eventually help land Vena in the C-Suite.
Precision Scheduled Railroading
Vena would become part of a generation of rail leaders who helped reinvent railroading under Canadian National CEO E. Hunter Harrison.
Harrison developed what is now called precision scheduled railroading. Trains would run on fixed schedules like airlines rather than coming to customers to pick up cargo like a taxi. The goal was to minimize rolling stock, workers, and other assets while maximizing their efficient use. Locomotives need to move, so to speak.
As Illinois Central’s leader, Harrison took its operating ratio—the percentage of revenue gobbled by costs—from the 90s to the 60s. The feat drove then-CN CEO Paul Tellier to pursue a merger between CN and Illinois Central to create what their application called the “first integrated, three-coast, single-line railroad in North America.” The STB approved the deal in 1999.
Harrison joined as chief operating officer. He brought along a protege named Keith Creel, who entered the management ranks in railroads in 1992 after serving as an Army officer during the Gulf War. Vena, who oversaw operations in British Columbia at the time of the merger, would get to know him well during their years working as vice presidents.
“Creel was Hunter’s guy,” said Rocky Hartline, a former CN general manager, in an interview. “And when Paul Tellier left, because Paul loved Jim Vena, Hunter just kept pushing Creel.”
Creel followed Harrison to Canadian Pacific when the revolutionary executive became CEO in 2012 with the help of investor Bill Ackman. Vena succeeded Creel as chief operating officer at his longtime company before retiring in 2016, a year after he became a US citizen. “There was always a bit of competition between Creel and Vena,” Hartline said. “Creel was always about a notch ahead of Vena on the pecking order but my view was that Vena was, he’s such a smart guy, he just kind of waited his time.”
Union Pacific came calling in 2019. They needed a PSR guy to oversee operations. A group of investors pitched him as a CEO for Canadian National two years later, but he dropped his bid and retired for a second time. Months later, he took a job on the board of
But then Creel—who succeeded Harrison (who left to lead
“You have this series of leaders around the rail world that I used to view as Band of Brothers,” longtime railroad analyst Anthony Hatch says while referring to the HBO show. “Now, I think it’s more like Game of Thrones.”
Windy City Showdown
The rivalry resurfaced the day after Vena, last July 29, announced plans for the takeover of Atlanta-based Norfolk Southern that was years in the making. Creel became an avatar of the opposition.
The nation needs “a loud voice in the room,” Creel told CPKC investors. “A network that big, if it gets sick, it’s not isolated to a particular geographic region in the nation. The entire nation is going to get sick. That’s the magnitude of this.”
He’s repeated that message in dueling appearances with Vena, including one in January at the Midwest Association of Rail Shippers outside Chicago.
Twice, Creel declared that he and Vena aren’t enemies. He nonetheless went more than 25 minutes past his allotted time hating on the merger, which would leave 40% of freight traffic in the hands of a single company. “Are we creating something too big to fail?” he said.
Vena countered the next day. “When he gets passionate, he goes on,” he said of Creel. “It’s like going to a preacher.”
Creel and other critics are just afraid of competition, according to Vena. “If you can’t compete in service, what do you have to compete with? It’s called price,” he said. “That’s what they’re scared about. Otherwise they would just shut up.”
Vena would later deny that he’s pushing the merger to one-up Creel, who declined an interview through a spokesperson. But before Vena left Chicago, he quipped how the competition in the daily “dog fight” of railroading extends to the $20.29 million he earned last year.
“I got to get paid $1 more than the other CEOs,” says Vena, who SEC filings show he made roughly $2.5 million more than Creel in 2025, told the conference. “That’s just the way it works. OK?”
Another Golden Spike
Regulators had encouraged consolidation for a generation after Vena first got into the railroad business, to keep struggling railroads from failing. But that ended when the STB in 2001 declared a new merger standard for Class 1 railroads—now roughly defined as those with more than $1 billion in operating revenue, which includes Amtrak.
Freight railroading within the US is mostly controlled by two duopolies: Union Pacific and BNSF in the west, with Norfolk Southern and CSX in the east. An approved UP-NS merger could spur the remaining two to pursue their own union.
The DOJ and FTC, which regulate mergers in other industries, bless deals when they don’t lead to “substantially less competition.” They have to “enhance competition” under the STB standard. “That can be done,” said Roger Nober, the former board chair. “But the question is, is the plan that’s in place going to be able to accomplish that goal?”
Technically, no one has yet. Creel’s deal went through only because the 2001 rule explicitly exempted Kansas City Southern, allowing it to unite with another Class 1 under the old rules because its survival as the smallest one might depend on a future deal. The first application UP and NS filed to meet the “enhanced competition” standard got rejected in part for lacking the data necessary to show it’d fuel as much growth as Vena claims.
A merger would benefit the country, said Adriene Bailey, a partner at Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm whose analysis is included in the first merger application. “It’s good for taxpayers. It’s good for keeping people safe. It’s good for energy efficiency in our nation.”
Vena has the support of SMART-TD—the nation’s largest rail union—shareholders, and elected officials across the country. But Vena still has the rest of the country to persuade in the weeks before the all-important refiling of the merger application. A brief public comment period will follow. A final decision by the STB could happen sometime around mid-2027.
Trump remains an X-factor. As part of the unprecedented authority he’s claimed over independent agencies, in August he fired Democratic STB member Robert Primus, who cast the lone vote against the Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern deal. The Joe Biden appointee has challenged the move in court.
A pending Supreme Court ruling could limit the president’s authority over the STB, but Trump will likely get a chance to name another member because Karen J. Hedlund, another Biden appointee, must vacate her post by the end of 2026. The board can have as many as five members but needs unanimity for decisions if it has fewer than three.
That’s where Union Pacific’s investments in a Trumpified locomotive and the ballroom might pay off. And if all goes well with the merger, and Union Pacific joins the Norfolk Southern in a place like Memphis, Vena says Trump could do something Lincoln never got the chance to do: hammer a golden spike.
“Would I be proud as an American, to have the president of the United States come out and want to be part of a celebration like that, absolutely like, who wouldn’t want to be, OK?” Vena says."That would be like spectacular.”
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