Section: Discrepancies
Where the story and the paperwork part ways
Every claim on this page comes from documents UP produced or letters filed on the public docket. We show the records side by side and let you judge. Four patterns stand out.
Pattern 1: Support built before the facts existed
Roughly 2,000 letters from officials, businesses, and civic groups endorsed the merger as a win for local economies, the environment, and Texans.
Bloomberg found the letters relied on a handful of templates circulated by a UP public relations firm before the application was filed. Signers could not have reviewed a transaction that did not yet exist on paper. The previously touted $750 million in concessions was quietly withdrawn. Since then, one Houston supporter has withdrawn to neutral, a county commissioner has disavowed a letter bearing his name, and a Houston business group's letter turned out to come from a board that includes a UP officer.
UP's Senior Director of Public Affairs testified in April 2025 that UP's average train length is 7,500 feet.
UP's 2025 SEC disclosures report quarterly average train lengths of 9,490, 9,689, 9,801, and 9,729 feet. Every quarter ran roughly 30% longer than the figure given to legislators.
Pattern 2: The review that misses the problem
UP's environmental review analyzed 68 grade crossings in the Houston region, nearly all of them rural or on the city's northeast edge. Cross-reference those 68 against the FRA's blocked-crossing complaint database and the mismatch is stark.
How did the worst crossings end up outside the review?
Thresholds. Because Houston is an ozone nonattainment area, environmental review of a rail line triggers when merger-related traffic rises by 3 trains per day or 50% in gross tonnage. The federal review's dataset gives the three approach segments east of Tower 87 +4.00 to +4.26 trains per day, so they get analyzed. The railroads' own figures give every urban-core segment through the East End +1.88 to +2.29 trains per day, just under the 3.0 trigger, so the crossings on them, including all of the national top 20, fall outside the review. One San Antonio segment lands at +2.98, two hundredths below the line. The analyzed and unanalyzed segments are separated by roughly one train a day. The round increments and the near-miss pattern are exactly what community comments are asking the Board to make UP explain.
49 C.F.R. § 1105.7(e)(5)(ii)(A); OEA scoping dataset (Aug. 19, 2026); STB filings EI-34223, EI-34224, EI-34228, Docket FD 36873.The Englewood Yard contradiction
UP's own Appendix Q, filed with the Board, lists Englewood Yard among manifest yards with a 20%+ activity increase: 2,044 to 2,456 cars per day, a 20.1% jump. The environmental review's yard table lists five yards nationwide, all on Norfolk Southern, and none in Texas. The difference comes from splitting growth into "organic" and "merger-related" buckets, which leaves the merger share just under the 20% review trigger. Both numbers cannot drive the analysis at once. Community comments ask the Board to reconcile them.
UP-NS Appendix Q, STB filing 311221; OEA scoping dataset, yard layer (A3), checked Sept. 4, 2026, Docket FD 36873.Pattern 3: A yard that crosses the line, served by tracks that never do
The railroads' September 9, 2026 tables show the Settegast intermodal yard growing from 242 to 610 units a day by Year 5. That is a 140.2% increase, among the largest in the country, and the tables mark it as exceeding federal review thresholds.
The same tables mark every Houston terminal segment as below threshold: the East Belt, the West Belt, the Settegast yard tracks, and the Houston Sub connectors. Of 55 Houston-area segments, 3 are marked yes. Not one East End crossing, including Polk, Sampson, Cullen, Eastwood, and Lockwood, appears in the crossing analysis.
The added traffic has to reach the yard somehow. Community comments filed with the environmental office ask it to study the Houston terminal tracks together with Settegast as one connected system, and to make the railroads say how 356 more units a day arrive and leave: on which tracks, in how many trains, at what lengths, and at what hours.
Houston neighborhood comments to OEA, Sept. 21, 2026; 49 C.F.R. §§ 1105.6(d), 1105.7(f).Pattern 4: Houston's numbers will not hold still
There are now five versions of the Houston projections. The first three shrank. The federal review's own dataset then went back up, and the September tables switched Settegast to a different unit of measure. The changes control which impacts get reviewed and mitigated.
| Metric | Original (Dec 19, 2025) | Amended (Apr 30, 2026) | Errata (Jul 27, 2026) | Federal review dataset (Aug 19, 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Settegast added trucks/day | +516 (246→762) | +360 (242→614) | +353 (→607) | +491 (246→750) |
| Lafayette Sub (MP 353–327.7) | +36.7% | +5.00 trains/day | unchanged; tonnage trimmed | +4.00 trains/day |
| Houston Sub at Tower 87 | +36.8% | +5.00 trains/day | unchanged; tonnage trimmed | +4.00 trains/day |
The July errata trimmed merger carloads on the Beaumont, Glidden, and Lafayette segments too. Its cover letter never mentions Houston. The Settegast truck reduction appears only in footnote 7. Two months earlier, the railroads had assured the Board that not a single carload of their diversion study had changed. By mid-September, rival railroads counted more than 200 pages of errata in 50 days and 2,446 new or replacement data files. The railroads have now said they will not change the diversion study again before November 18. Maybe every revision has an innocent explanation. The point of the public comment process is to make UP provide one, on the record.
STB filings EI-34262–63; UP-62/NS-60 reply, May 26, 2026; BNSF-54/CPKC-48/CSXT-27, filing 312315 (Sept. 14, 2026); UP-107/NS-107, filing 312336 (Sept. 15, 2026), Docket FD 36873.Why residents should care about accounting fights. These are not paperwork technicalities. The traffic numbers decide whether the East End's crossings get studied, whether Settegast's truck routes get reviewed, and whether Houston qualifies for binding mitigation. Smaller numbers on paper mean smaller obligations later, whatever the trains do in real life.