WASHINGTON — As part of their review of the Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern merger, federal regulators will consider requests for conditions from Canadian National and Norfolk Southern.
The Surface Transportation Board on July 1 said that it has accepted the so-called responsive applications from CN and NS.
CN has asked the board to force CP to divest KCS’s former Gateway Western lines linking Springfield, Ill., with Kansas City and St. Louis. This would allow CN to create a new single-line service route between Eastern Canada, Detroit, and Kansas City.
CN says it would invest $250 million on the line and would ultimately divert 80,000 truckloads to intermodal annually. CN also requested short segments of trackage rights on KCS, particularly to reach its intermodal terminal just south of Kansas City.
NS has asked the board to impose various conditions that would protect its intermodal service on the NS-KCS Meridian Speedway joint venture.
The merger threatens to degrade intermodal service on the Meridian Speedway that serves as a shortcut between the Southeast and Southwest, NS told federal regulators last month.
NS and KCS currently operate interline intermodal trains over the Meridian, Miss.-Shreveport, La., Meridian Speedway. KCS handles the NS trains over its Shreveport-Wylie, Texas, main line on a haulage rights basis.
NS is seeking trackage rights between Wylie and Shreveport that would kick in only if Canadian Pacific Kansas City’s service deteriorated. NS wants the board to enforce CP’s promises to support KCS’s existing interline agreements. And it has asked regulators to make CP commit to making “no significant detrimental changes to current operations on the Meridian Speedway.”
The board said that the requests by CN and NS met regulatory standards, so it had no basis to reject them.
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