Federal regulators, declaring the rail bottleneck that paralyzed shipping throughout the Midwest and West had eased, said Friday there was no reason to continue emergency orders that forced the Union Pacific Railroad to allow competitors access to its customers in the Houston area.
The Surface Transportation Board, the successor agency to the Interstate Commerce Commission, while acknowledging that rail service hasn’t returned to normal, said it could not continue forcing Union Pacific to give up its business.
At its height earlier this year, the gridlock caused by Union Pacific’s acquisition of Southern Pacific Railroad clogged ports up and down the West Coast; left Midwestern farmers holding millions of bushels of grain they couldn’t ship; and forced the temporary closing of dozens of petrochemical plants along the Gulf Coast.
Union Pacific must continue filing weekly performance reports with the board.
