■ From the Field

WHAT THE MERGER GETS RIGHT

On an Argument Conducted Entirely in the Future Tense — and What the Board Did to It This Morning

Every argument being made about the Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern merger is an argument about the past. The opponents reach for Southern Pacific. The proponents reach for Santa Fe. And not one of those precedents is this merger — because this merger has not happened. This morning the Surface Transportation Board said the same thing in the only language a regulator has: it accepted the application as complete, then held the proceeding in abeyance and sent the applicants back to produce this railroad's facts instead of the last railroad's ghost. The merger gets the problem right. The argument gets the future wrong. Both are true at once — and the field reads what is true regardless of which direction the truth runs.