Union Pacific runs over 32,000 miles of track and about 8,300 locomotives across 23 states, and in 2025 it proposed an $85 billion merger with Norfolk Southern billed as the first transcontinental railroad under one company. The 1869 line met that description only as a partnership: Union Pacific built west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, largely with Irish laborers, and met the Central Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, under the Pacific Railroad Act that Abraham Lincoln signed in 1862 to bind the West to the Union. Executive Thomas C. Durant set up Crédit Mobilier of America, which billed Union Pacific inflated construction costs that were passed on to the government, and its discounted shares went to influential congressmen. Exposure in 1872, followed by the panics of 1873 and 1893, pushed the railroad into bankruptcy.
To create traffic, Union Pacific co-founded the Pacific Fruit Express refrigerated car fleet in 1906, and chairman W. Averell Harriman added the M-10000 streamliner and in 1936 built the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho. It still took new steam engines such as No. 844 as late as 1944. Later it absorbed the Missouri Pacific, Western Pacific, Chicago and North Western and, in 1996, the Southern Pacific, sharing the West with BNSF. Under Precision Scheduled Railroading it replaced hump yards with flat yards, closing major ones in Kansas, Oregon and Arkansas in 2019. The Federal Railroad Administration reprimanded the company in 2023 over defect rates and warned its CEO in 2024 that layoffs were compromising inspections.
A 2004 chlorine release in Macdonough, Texas, killed three people, and investigators cited crew fatigue and hazardous cars placed too close to the front of the train.
In 2019 a remotely operated train ran over a broken rail in Portland, Oregon, derailed and destroyed an overpass's support columns.
In 2025 an EF3 tornado in Kansas blew more than 100 double-stacked cars off a train that had stopped to wait out the storm.
Texas identified cancer clusters, including childhood leukemia, near a Houston rail yard where creosote was used on ties for decades.
Its presidential locomotives include the Bush 4141, which pulled his funeral train, the Lincoln 1616 and the Trump 4547, which first hauled Artemis rocket parts.
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