The Loadstar leader: Tracking history may help rail's new golden age of M&A

© Derek Audette

Project 2025 author Kevin Roberts – the reported blueprint for Trump’s returning administration – has been vocal in extolling the 2020s as the start of America’s new “golden age”. While the re-elected Trump may be at the vanguard, “a battering ram through the fortress of the ruling class,” it is a moment Roberts says is made possible by the country “regaining its appetite for work, for production, and for independence”. At least that’s one way of looking at it.

Another way would be to draw parallels to the 30-year period leading to the start of the last century, a gilded age which bore witness to a rapid surge in US economic growth and wealth creation, but, perhaps most importantly, wealth disparity. That disparity was as much among companies as it was individuals, with the likes of Standard Oil, US Steel, and the railroads engaging in monopolistic practices.

On the tracks, these practices occurred through cooperation agreements, business pooling, and the setting of common rates. But M&A activity made stark the monopolisation’s reality. As larger railroads bought up their smaller rivals, their powers intensified, allowing them to determine the fate of their customers’ businesses. Railroads would deliberately raise rates and then, having placed businesses into precarity, offer to buy them out at a cut-rate price, moving from pure railroad operators to conglomerates.

In the fallout of the Covid pandemic – a period of rapid US economic growth, wealth creation, and wealth disparity – the transport and logistics sector has borne witness to its own period of M&A and conglomeration as ocean liners fat off the riches of Covid-era rates began acquiring airlines. And again, railroads are getting in on the action.

Most recently we saw the formation of CP-KCS following a fraught battle with CN. Now it seems Union Pacific, that beast of the earlier gilded age, is eyeing a massive $250bn merger with Norfolk Southern.

While any deal may help get US rail back on the tracks, history – past and recent – shows the dangers of monopolisation of transport networks.