The Union Pacific Railroad (AAR reporting mark UP) (NYSE: UNP) is the largest railroad in the United States. James R. Young is president and CEO of the Railroad.

The Union Pacific's route map covers most of the central and western United States, westward of Chicago and New Orleans. It has achieved this size thanks to purchasing a large number of other railroads; notable purchases include the Missouri Pacific, Chicago and North Western, Western Pacific, Missouri-Kansas-Texas, and Southern Pacific (which itself was purchased by the Rio Grande before UP purchased it).

Union Pacific's chief competitor is the BNSF Railway, which covers much of the same territory.

History

The Union Pacific Railroad was incorporated on July 1, 1862 in the wake of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. The first rails were laid in Omaha, Nebraska. They were part of the railroads which came together at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869 as the first transcontinental railroad in North America. Subsequently, the Union Pacific took over the Utah Central extending south from Ogden, Utah through Salt Lake City, and the Utah & Northern, extending from Ogden through Idaho into Montana, and it built or absorbed local lines, which gave it access to Denver and to Portland, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest. It acquired the Kansas Pacific (originally called the Union Pacific, Eastern Division, though in essence a separate railroad). It also owned narrow gauge trackage into the heart of the Colorado Rockies and a standard gauge line south from Denver across New Mexico into Texas.

Union Pacific was entangled in the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872. The railroad's early troubles led to bankruptcy during the 1870s, the result of which was reorganization of the Union Pacific Railroad as the Union Pacific Railway on January 24, 1880. The new company also declared bankruptcy, in 1893, but emerged on July 1, 1897, reverting again to the original name, Union Pacific Railroad. Such minor changes in corporate titles were a common result of reorganization after bankruptcy among American railroads. The recovered railroad was strong enough to take control of Southern Pacific Railroad in 1901 and then was ordered in 1913 by the U.S. Supreme Court to surrender control of the same. The Union Pacific Railroad also founded the Sun Valley resort in Idaho. In 1996, the UP finally acquired the Southern Pacific Railroad in a transaction that was envisioned nearly a century earlier.

From 1948 to the early 1970s the UP operated a series of gas turbine-electric locomotives. No other railroad in the world operated turbines on such a scale. At one point, UP claimed that the turbines hauled ten percent of the railroad's freight. They were retired due to rising fuel costs. Two of them can now be seen in museums.

The headquarters of UP has been in Omaha, Nebraska since its inception, currently in the Union Pacific Center, completed in 2003.

Union Pacific Corporation

In 1986 Union Pacific purchased Overnite Transportation, a fairly major less-than-truckload shipping carrier. Union Pacific divested itself of Overnite Trucking through an IPO in late 2003 but still owned a sizable stake until UPS agreed to purchase Overnite in May 2005 for $1.25 billion.

That same year, the Union Pacific Corporation was created as a holding company for Union Pacific and its related properties, initially including the railroad and Overnite.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Union Pacific Corporation purchased several non-railroad companies, such as Skyway Freight Systems of Watsonville, California and United States Pollution Control, Inc., but by 2000, following the accession of Richard K. Davidson as CEO of the Corporation, it had divested itself of all non-railroad properties except for Overnite Trucking, and its holding company for logistical technology, Fenix Enterprises.

The Corporation was located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania until 1997, when Richard K. Davidson announced that the headquarters of the Corporation was moving to Dallas in September of that year. Upon the sale of Skyway and the impending divestiture of Overnite, however, the corporate headquarters were moved to Omaha to join the headquarters of the railroad only two years later, in 1999.

Current trackage

Primarily concentrated west of the Mississippi River, the Union Pacific Railroad directly owns and operates track in 23 U.S. states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. For administrative purposes, the Union Pacific’s track network is divided into 21 “service units”:Chicago, Council Bluffs, Commuter Operations, Denver, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Livonia, Los Angeles, North Little Rock, North Platte, Portland, Roseville, San Antonio, Saint Louis, Tucson, Twin Cities, Utah, and Wichita. Each “service unit” is further divided into many different subdivisions, which represent segments of track ranging from 300-mile mainlines to 10-mile branch-lines.

Not including second, third and fourth main line trackage, yard trackage, and siding trackage, the Union Pacific directly operates some 36,206 miles (58,364 kilometers) of track as of March 24, 2000. When the additional tracks are counted, however, the amount of track that the Union Pacific has direct control over rises to 54,116 miles (87,091 kilometers).

Union Pacific has also been able to reach agreements with competing railroads, mostly BNSF, that allows the railroad to operate its own trains with its own crews on hundreds of miles of competing railroads’ main tracks.

Furthermore, due to the practice of locomotive leasing and sharing undertaken by the Class 1 Railways, Union Pacific locomotives occasionally show up on competitors' tracks throughout the United States, Canada and most recently, Mexico.

Yards and facilities

Because of the enormity of the Union Pacific, hundreds of yards throughout the Union Pacific’s rail network are needed to effectively handle the daily transport of goods from one place to another.

Among the more prominent rail yards in Union Pacific’s system include:

• Bailey Yard, the largest railroad classification yard in the world, located in North Platte, Nebraska.
• The Hinkle Locomotive Service and Repair Facility, the largest locomotive facility along the Union Pacific, in Hinkle, Oregon.
• J.R. Davis Yard, the largest rail facility on the United States’ west coast, in Roseville, California.
• Jenks Shop, one of the largest locomotive overhaul and maintenance facilities in the world, located in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
• Global III Intermodal Facility, a critical interchange hub and loading/unloading terminal for intermodal shipments moving through the Chicago metropolitan area, in Rochelle, Illinois.