Consolidation Would Make

System 18,000 Miles in Extent. One of Largest in Country.

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PART OF PLAN COMBINING MORE THAN 100 LINES

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Northwestern and Union Pacific Have Been Closely

Allied for Many Years.

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Under a proposed railway merger between the Chicago & North Western and the Union Pacific lines, involving 18,000 miles of track and serving 19 states, Minneapolis would become a major terminus of the consolidated system, with direct connections and trackage covering a network over the agricultural belt of the midwest and northwest, the intermountain territory, and the Pacific states.

The union of the two roads would involve also their many subsidiaries, including the Omaha road, controlled by the North Western through ownership of stock, which serves Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, Worthington and Omaha. Other roads affected would be the Los Angeles & Salt Lake, Oregon Short Line, the Oregon — Washington Railroad & Navigation Co., and the St. Joseph & Grand Island, all controlled by the Union Pacific.

This merger is forecast in dispatches from New York, which say: “Negotiations are well advanced for combining more than 100 leading lines into a dozen or more great systems, most of which will have properties valued in excess of $1,000,000,000 and operate between 10,000 and 20,000miles of track.”

Another consolidation mentioned in the New York forecast is that of the Northern Pacific, Great Northern and Burlington, the three so-called Hill roads of the northwest, whose plans for merging into a 24,000-mile system is in the hands of the interstate commerce commission.

Reports of the Union Pacific show that it owns more than $4,000,000 of the capital stock of the North Western and the two roads for years have been allied closely in the matter of transcontinental service, both freight and passenger. The 19 states served by the amalgamated system would be: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.

According to the report the recent adoption of plans to fuse the St. Louis — San Francisco and Rock Island railways into a single system is another step toward discarding the tentative grouping proposals of the interstate commerce commission’s consolidation plan, which will remake the country’s railroad map.

Brown County Journal,

Feb. 12, 1926

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