Comment / US Rail: Is the STB sugaring the merger pill with a move on switching?

ID 17594711 © Karen Hoar | Dreamstime.com

In a nutshell: The regulator’s bid to tear up 40 years of captive-shipper rules lands just as it weighs America’s first transcontinental railroad merger. Coincidence, or strategy?

For four decades, US freight shippers captive to a single railroad have had, in theory, the right to ask the Surface Transportation Board (STB) for access to a competing carrier.

In practice, that right has been a mirage*.

(*Editor’s note: there are several moving parts in today’s new M&A rail analysis – have ...