In 2025, the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern announced that they were intending to merge, forming the first transcon in the USA. This set off a frenzy of negotiations, including between CPKC and the PV&T Trust, which quickly became a merger between the two railways.
(Background is that when the CPR spun off the Canadian Atlantic Railway, the LT&L & PV&T stepped in and purchased it and started to electrify the route from Sherbrooke to St Johns. When the CPR came back 20 years later and offered to purchase it back, the Trust politely declined, leaving the CPR with nothing but trackage rights west and south of Montréal. The two railroad had merger talks subsequent to this, but were unable to reach a deal and the CPR then expanded south into Mexico by merging with the Kansas City Southern.)
CPKC really wanted a route to the east, but CSX was already in talks with BNSF and the CPR didn’t have nearly enough money to compete with BNSF in a bidding war. The Parsons Vale Lines, similarly, wanted routes to the west (they ran joint trains between Vancouver, BC, and various ports in the east, but really wanted to extend CPR’s Rocky Mountain electrification eastwards.)
And CPKC was already being boxed out by the Canadian Nationals superior network, so they had an incentive to talk to the Trust.
In 2026, this merger was approved, and CPKC was merged into the Trust (renamed to the United Railways Trust, which stayed in Montréal while reducing CPKC’s Calgary HQ to a divisional HQ.)
Post-merger, the CPR was pruned down to its western network, keeping nothing of the eastern network other than the connections to Toronto and Buffalo. (The Michigan Central Tunnel was conveyed to Conrail Shared Assets as a condition of the merger, the line from Windsor to the junction with the CTRC just west of St. Thomas went to CSX, and everything else on the eastern network was transferred to the LT&L and Ottawa Central.)
CPR subsidiary KCS remains basically unchanged, but engineering work is being done to electrify from Ciudad de México to Nuevo Laredo & Veracruz. (A good deal of this engineering work from Ciudad de México north was already done for the abortive NdeM electrification in the 1980s, prior to privatisation and the passing of that project into the hands of (the notoriously electrification-shy) US magnates.
Modern railway mergers involve a lot of sharing of trackage rights, so as a result of this merger both BNSF & the Union Pacific now have trackage rights to the LT&L’s St Johns terminal and the CBR’s terminal in North Sydney, NS.
The future roadmap for the CPR sees the KCS being moved out from under its control to being a direct subsidiary of the Trust, as well as having a new master dispatching office set up in Toronto (the CPR continues to dispatch their western network from Calgary, the KCS continue to dispatch their southern network from Kansas City, and the original Trust railroad continue to be dispatched from Montréal – the master dispatching office is exclusively for handing trains from one network to another.)
The CPR and KCS are not yet subject to the Trust’s pay ceilings, but quite a few of the senior administrative staff have been offered buyouts and the plan is that one they’re gone the pay ceilings will go into place.