The United Railways Trust is the holding company that controls the united railway system of the former Parsons Vale Trust and CPKC.
It was formed after of these railroads agreed to merge in 2025, and formally took charge (dissolving the Parsons Vale Trust in the process) in 2026.
The structure of this Trust is basically that of the old Parsons Vale Trust, with the same 20/1 ratio of highest to lowest salaries on the line, the requirement that 50%+1 of the voting stock remaining in the hands of the trust, and the requirement that the unions have seats on the board.
When the merger was agreed on, the old Parsons Vale Trust found itself looking at two railway systems with radically different management philosophies; the PV&T Trust’s railways were run as a (at least by North American standards) socialist cooperative with both union representation & seats on the boards for each of the primary railways of the Trust, while the CPR and KCS were run in full capitalist rent-extraction mode with small crews, huge executive compensation, and stock buybacks like you wouldn’t believe.
This, of course, meant that the Trust had much more money and credit available, and thanks to electrification was able to maintain a stupidly high operating margin even with minimum 3-persons crews on their trains, and this better cash position meant that they were able to dictate much of the design of the new United Railways Trust.
The board of the new Trust is made up of representatives from the three districts, seats for ILW, GFM, and Groupe I&M, seven union seats, and three at large seats.
The UR Trust’s railway network is split into three districts; Northeastern, which is all of the railroads under the original Parsons Vale Trust, Western, which is the CPR and its subsidiaries with the exception of the KCS, which is the new Southern district. When the Trust was formed, each of these districts were allowed to continue to operate with their existing corporate structures (thus the Southern & Western districts continued to operate as the moral equivalent to CPKC) with the agreement to meet the next year to talk about revisions to more closely align to a common governing style.
The officers of CPKC & the Parsons Vale Trust were all offered generous buyout terms if they didn’t want to continue in the new organizations, which most of the CPR’s head office took advantage of (as Canadians, they were quite aware of just how relentless the LT&L – the de facto head of the Parsons Vale Trust – could be, and would rather have money in hand and an excellent job history instead of having to deal with the irrestistable force that was the LT&L.)
(To be honest, the writing is on the wall for KCS’s management as well; Precision Scheduled Railroading, as implemented by Hunter Harrison and his proteges, pisses off the railroad unions and the union seats on the new board have not been quiet about wanting to revisit that implementation given that it does not produce significantly better results than the employee-first policies of the old Parsons Vale Trust.)
The operational roadmap for the new system is the same as it was for the Parsons Vale Trust, and, to a lesser extent, more electrification. The CPR has started electrifying more of its transcontinental route – wire is going up between Sudbury & Thunder Bay – and KCSM re-electrified the old NdeM 25kvac electrification running north of Cuidad de México and has started to run wire up from Veracruz toward Cuidad de México.
The United Railways Trust, like the Parsons Vale Trust before it, is headquartered in Montréal, PQ. District operating HQs are in Montréal (Northwestern district), Calgary (Western district), and Kansas City (Southern district).