SCHAUMBURG, Ill. — Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena had the crowd laughing Thursday (Jan. 15) throughout his talk to the Midwest Association of Rail Shippers, to the point that analyst Anthony B. Hatch, the event’s final speaker, said that he appreciated getting the chance “to do a set at the Vena Comedy Club.”
One example was Vena’s digression into a discussion of artificial intelligence, which may not be quite the non-sequitur it seems. He brought up the topic while needling CPKC CEO Keith Creel, a speaker the previous day, about an AI-generated image Creel created for his presentation.
“I’ll tell you why I have a real problem with AI and ChatGPT and everything else,” Vena said. “People that work for me will tell you that when I answer an email, I don’t like to put a thousand words down.”
But the company’s “IT guy,” he said, was insistent that he should try ChatGPT: “It’s like spectacular. It helps you. It’ll help save you a lot of time on your emails. And I’m going, ‘How is it gonna help me? I have five good words I say: No. Yes. Forget it. Are you crazy?’ I guess there’s six.
“Bottom line is I thought I’ll try this. So I get this email, and I said okay, ‘Give me an answer.’ It wrote me two paragraphs to basically say, ‘come and see me because I don’t think we’re on the same page.’ And I sent it. And everybody that works for me, because it went out to multiple people, they all said, ‘You tried ChatGPT, didn’t you?’
“I said, ‘I did. Do you want me to keep on doing it?’ And they said no, we’d rather have those simple words because we all know exactly where you are with this.’”
Pro-merger, even for others
Vena was asked if he would support a BNSF-CSX merger, or any other consolidation, if the UP-NS merger is approved.
“Yes,” he said instantly, and paused. “That was not a ChatGPT answer.
“The reason for it is it’s better for customers. It is absolutely better for customers. Think about this. It’s end to end. We bolt it on. And if somebody else wants to compete to have better service, we’re able to bring more into the railway industry than we do if we’re separated in the way we are right now. No ifs, ands, or buts. I would not come out against it. I’d be very supportive.
“Now in the application we didn’t have to talk about it because [BNSF] has been pretty adamant that they don’t want anything to do with it. We’ll see about that.
“My wife didn’t want to marry me, either.”
Big Boy’s big trip
Vena also mentioned the plans for UP’s Big Boy steam locomotive, 4-8-8-4 No. 4014, to make a trip to the East Coast this year to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
“We are gonna run that Big Boy, which I really have a love-hate relationship with. I really do. Unless it can carry 100 cars of grain, I don’t want it on the railroad. But at the end of the day, there’s a lot of benefits for it, and we are going to run it across the country. We are going to go coast-to-coast. We’ll start at the end of March. We’ll get the exact dates.
“We’re having a few problems with our partner in the East to exactly finalize it, but I’m telling you, they better freakin’ hurry up. [This was directed at an NS executive who is a MARS board member.] Okay? Because we want to announce it.”
Not his time (line)
Vena is not happy with the projected timeline for Surface Transportation Board review of the merger, which would be 390 days under the UP-NS proposal. “It’s bureaucracy at its worst that it would take us a year to get approval on something that should be done,” he said, adding that when he met with President Donald Trump in September, Trump suggested that the two of them could get deal worked out in three or four hours.
Later, in response to a question, he added, “Listen, we don’t want to go into 2027. There’s no reason for us. The timeline that the STB has given us so far, I believe that they’re going to live up to their timelines. So we’ll go through the process.
“I think it’s too long, and that’s my opinion, but they’re the keepers of the keys, right? We’re not, so we have to go through it. And we knew that when we started this. It wasn’t like we thought, hey, we’re going to get them to change their mind and go to six months. We knew it was going to take them a while to go through this.
“I don’t know why, but it is what it is.”
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My take, the merger will happen. Vena has kissed Trump’s ring and has his blessing.
BNSF & CSX will happen too, it just makes more sense for BNSF to oppose UP’s merger now to get maximum concessions–which wouldn’t happen if they too had their own merger proposal in front of the board. Once the UP deal is approved, BNSF will move quickly.