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11/11/2025
By Pat Foran, Editor-in-Chief
One thing Jim Vena values is clarity. In words. In deeds. In thinking. For the CEO of Union Pacific Corp., being clear is the only line with a shot at connecting two potentially disconnected points or constituencies.
And being consistently clear about what you mean, about your intentions, is the only way to truly communicate. It’s the only way to move anything — be it a dialogue, an idea, a partnership, a business — forward.
“You’ve got to be clear on what the objective is and don’t lose sight of it,” Vena says he told UP employees the day he took over as CEO two years ago. “If you interviewed people in the company, none of them would say, ‘I wonder what we’re doing as a company.’ We’re clear about what we’re trying to do.”
At UP, Vena so far has done what he said he’d do, coming to the largest freight railroad in North America after holding a variety of leadership positions during his four-decade tenure with CN. He drove best-in-class operating and service results at CN, and he’s driving them at UP.
“Jim exemplifies the best of what I call the ‘CN diaspora’ and really seems to have gotten his historic railroad to achieve something that seemed just out of reach for many years — fulfill its vast potential,” says independent transportation analyst Tony Hatch, who is program consultant for Progressive Railroading’s annual RailTrends® conference. “And I truly appreciate his employment of what he calls ‘buffer’ — additional resources in reserve to provide resiliency and support agility — in these uncertain times.”
In late July, Vena made a clear and definitive step toward reshaping the rail landscape when UP entered into a merger agreement with Norfolk Southern Corp.
“Now, Vena is embarking on a brand-new venture, trying to create the first U.S. transcontinental railroad,” says Hatch. “It’s a bit like Columbus sailing off in search of riches but not knowing what he’ll find en route.”
To be sure, Vena’s an explorer — of planet Earth as well as the world of ideas. As a leader, the longtime railroader plans for what’s reasonable while factoring in what’s possible; he lives in the now while charting a course for next. And while Columbus is a metaphor for the American Dream, Vena embodies it.
In May, Progressive Railroading and RailTrends named Vena the 2025 recipient of the Railroad Innovator Award, which recognizes an individual’s outstanding achievement in the rail industry. He’ll receive the award during RailTrends 2025, which will be held Nov. 20-21 at the New York Marriott Marquis in New York City.
“As a CEO, you can focus on a lot of different things. With Jim, we focus on railroading,” says Eric Gehringer, UP’s executive vice president of operations. “That’s something that’s been welcome, different and valuable. He’s one of those unique leaders.”
Vena also has a unique view of the world. Literally. He’s been pretty much everywhere.
Vena, 67, was born in southern Italy where, after World War II, there weren’t a lot of jobs, Vena says. His father found work in southern France and came home to Italy as often as he could.
In the early 1960s, the family emigrated to Jaspar, a small mountain town in Alberta, Canada.
“My parents came with two suitcases and my brother and I,” Vena says.
He loved growing up in Jaspar, where he participated in a range of competitive sports, from cross-country skiing to hockey to basketball. Vena also did his share of mountaineering, canoeing, kayaking and motorcycling, and maybe even a little stargazing. Nestled within the Canadian Rockies, Jaspar National Park is home to the world’s second-largest dark sky preserve.
“It was an absolutely beautiful location, a wonderful place,” he says. “I think it forms who you are, that kind of location — the people, the friends, the mountains, the fresh water, the fresh air.”
That kind of location certainly shaped the man Vena is.
“It’s pretty exciting to wake up when you can see your breath, hiking at 17,000 feet, and you’re going in and you’re challenging yourself — mentally and physically. You’re going to do something,” he says. “It’s very challenging to go back-country skiing and be 20 miles away from the nearest coffee shop and see what you’re made of. To me, that’s just about as much fun as what I’m doing today.”
Less fun, at least initially, was Vena’s initial foray into the thing called “rail.” At 15, he spent his summer working on the railroad with CN.
“I was on a rail gang and we were throwing ties out of gondola cars,” he says. “My dad asked me that evening about my first day on the job. I said, ‘Dad, it’s got to be the stupidest job I’ve ever seen in the world.’”
His dad — “he was very loving, strict,” Vena says — expected Jim to work. Work as in work.
“The worst thing you could be is a person who was idle, in my dad’s eyes,” Vena says. “He said to me, ‘You’ll be in the best physical shape of your life by the time summer’s done, so go out there and suck it up.’”
Vena did. And come summer’s end, he was in the best shape he’d ever been in. Meanwhile, rail was on his radar then as, if nothing else, a good-paying summer job.
Vena appreciated the directness and clarity of his dad’s message. His mom’s teach-by-example guidance also resonated.
“If my mother told you something, it was the truth,” he says. “You never had to wonder.”
But Vena did wonder about the nature of things and the world outside his window. At 17, he left Jaspar to enroll at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. There, he earned a degree in mathematics.
“If I were smart enough, after I graduated, I was going to be a mathematician or physicist or something like that,” Vena says. “But more important is what took me away from that.”
What took him away was that tough, not-so-stupid rail job. Still in college, Vena signed on with CN full time in 1977. He started as a brakeman.
“That was in the days when there were four people on the train — a caboose and four people,” Vena says. “It was pretty exciting.”
It also was liberating, financially. Working at CN enabled Vena to graduate in 1979 with no debt.
“At 21, the railroad offers a lot of value,” he says. “It was an excellent-paying job with great benefits. Just like it is today. And if you want to make a life out of it, you can. As long as you’re willing to work.”
Vena was, and he did, seizing opportunities to advance in the years that followed. He became a conductor fairly quickly. Over the next four decades, he’d transition to roles as a locomotive engineer, trainmaster and superintendent at CN before becoming an executive, ultimately serving as chief operating officer.
“I was blessed to be given that opportunity to learn so much of what drives and makes a railroad successful,” Vena says.
He credits his early CN mentors for trusting him enough to put him in positions with increasing responsibility.
“At that time, local people decided whether someone had the capabilities,” Vena says. “You never know the capability of a person until you put them on the new job.”
You also never know the capability of a railroad until you establish a clear vision, communicate it consistently, trust your people to make decisions and lead accordingly.
That’s what CN’s 1995 privatization, and the CEO who drove it, demonstrated to Vena.
The CEO was Paul Tellier, who led CN from 1992 to 2002. Tellier was quick, clear and concise in his message-sending. Change is good, he’d say; quick change is even better.
“Paul was a smart, driven person who knew where the goal was and had a clear eye how to get there,” says Vena, a superintendent at the time of the privatization. “He communicated well. He was able to drive people.”
Tellier also taught Vena the importance of setting reasonable goals without limiting yourself to them. Tellier’s message: Think, always, about next levels, about next.
“He once came to see a customer with me — we went down to a potash mine together — and he was clear-eyed, talking about what’s possible,” Vena says. “I use that today. At Union Pacific, we look at what’s possible, at what we need to do to move ahead.”
When Tellier left the railroad to become president and CEO of Bombardier Inc. in 2003, Hunter Harrison was named CN’s president and CEO. The master of scheduled railroading, Harrison preached the “Do what you say you’ll do” gospel and was another leader Vena respected.
“He was driven, he was clear — everything he did was to make the railroad operationally better and provide a higher level of service for customers,” Vena says. “I think sometimes people miss that with him, and thought he was just about operations.”
The two strong leaders didn’t always see eye to eye, Vena says, but he appreciated Harrison’s willingness to hear him out.
“We had some great discussions,” Vena says. “What I loved about Hunter was he understood the day-to-day operation of the railroad better than any CEO I had ever worked with.”
Vena also relished working with Claude Mongeau, who became CN’s president and CEO when Harrison retired in late 2009. Over the next six years, Mongeau kept the Class I on track in terms of operational efficiency and service performance while instilling a focus on supply chain collaboration.
“Claude was smart, very strategic,” says Vena, who served as CN’s COO during half of Mongeau’s CEO stint. “I loved working for him.”
When Mongeau stepped down for health reasons in June 2016, Vena decided to retire at the end of the same month. As CN’s COO since 2013, Vena had helped the railroad post the industry’s best operating ratio and achieve the best safety incident ratio in the Class I’s history. But he wanted to spend more time with his wife, who’d endured 17 moves during his CN career.
“I wasn’t sure whether I was ever going to go back to work,” Vena says.
One thing he was sure about: He missed the outdoors, he missed the mountains. So, Vena booked a trip to the north face of Mount Everest in October 2016.
“I remember sitting in Mount Everest base camp, having lunch in a tent, looking at the mountain,” he says. “For me, it’s not a spiritual journey that I have to do some of these things that I do. ... Everest is the biggest mountain, the tallest mountain. So guess what? Jim Vena says, ‘I want to go there.’”
Vena would go to a lot of places over the next couple years, none of which involved rail work. Unlike some railroaders who step away from the rail life, Vena never had the urge to consult.
“I’m the kind of person who wants to own it — to deliver what you own and make it better, not write a story about it,” he says. “I want to be part of it.”
And when UP in late 2018 asked Vena to be part of North America’s largest Class I and lead all aspects of the railroad’s operations, he paused.
“The question I asked myself was, ‘Why would you want to go back to work?’ People work because, one, there’s a challenge. Second, there’s an opportunity. At that point in my life and career, it was ‘How big is the challenge and how big is the opportunity?’”
Vena saw the challenge, and it was big.
He saw the opportunity, and it, too, was large.
“Union Pacific was a fantastic railroad, a great franchise with great people,” he says. “They just needed to be led to able to make the right decisions so they could operate a railroad that had a higher level of customer service, so they could compete out in the marketplace and win. And that’s what I could bring.”
Vena joined UP as COO in January 2019.
“I promised them I would work for two years, and that’s what I did,” he says.
Right out of the chute, Vena began working with people he characterizes as “very strong,” including Gehringer, then serving as chief engineer; Kenny Rocker, executive vice president of marketing and sales; and Jennifer Hamann, then serving as SVP of finance.
“We changed the company in those two years,” Vena says. “We became the most efficient railroad in North America, and were delivering customer service that was higher than we had ever done before. That’s what I came back to work for.”
The UP leadership team was glad he did.
“It was clear he had a vision,” says Hamann, who now serves as EVP and chief financial officer. “He would say he was hired for a very specific reason — to help us become much more efficient, to improve PSR performance, which was something that we had not been able to do on our own.”
While Vena acknowledges he was brought in for his operating acumen, he resists the suggestion he’s a “PSR person.”
“I’ve never, ever, classified myself that way — other people have,” he says. “I’ve developed skills in my career, and because I’ve worked so many jobs, there are a few things I’m not bad at. I can be pretty good as a railroader.”
“Pretty good” doesn’t cover it, Hamann says.
“He very quickly looks at things and sees things that maybe the average railroader doesn’t,” she says.
What also sets Vena apart is his relentless focus on railroading and the process, Gehringer says.
“I think that sometimes gets lost when you have a leader that sees the foundation of innovation as, ‘Do we understand the process that we have, the gaps that we have, the gaps or opportunities that exists with this property?’” Gehringer says. “That’s really unique.”
So is his ability to keep the message simple.
“And he reinforces it,” Gehringer says. “He’s available — it could 2 a.m. on a vacation day. He’s always been a servant leader. You get to leverage 47 years of railroading experience.”
And then there’s Vena’s love for taking on challenges.
“He loves to compete,” Hamann says. “If you say, ‘You can’t do that,’ that’s a challenge to Jim.”
Once his two-year UP stint ended in June 2021, Vena challenged himself in other ways. He went to Patagonia. He biked through Europe. He traveled to the mountains, including Mont Blanc and the south side of Mount Everest.
“I did all those things I could not do when I was working because I could not take three weeks off being an operating person on a railroad,” he says. “Some things my wife didn’t want to do with me, so she’d say, ‘You go.’ She never did come to Nepal with me. Or Tibet.”
He also would have gone to K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, in the summer of 2023 if UP hadn’t come calling again — this time, to replace CEO Lance Fritz.
“I never really expected to come back, but a lot of things came together,” says Vena, who took the CEO reins on Aug. 14, 2023.
To Vena, UP’s top job represented yet another big challenge, one he believed he could meet. On his first day as CEO, Vena sent a letter (“A Note from Jim”) to UP employees telling them how he, with their help, would meet the challenge.
“I wanted to make sure we were clear on what our vision was, and it was safety, service and operational excellence,” he says. “It’s a nice, clear message. People understand it.”
Vena’s message-sending has been clear from day one, Hamann says.
“What he’s reinforced for all of us is that at the core of being successful, it’s about running a consistent, reliable and safe railroad,” Gehringer adds. “It’s exciting to get 30,000 people aligned, as much as they can be.”
Alignment doesn’t mean there aren’t differences in interpretations, say, of Vena’s message, no matter how nuance-free it is.
“Everybody uses the word ‘culture’ to describe what the employees and what the company are all about. I look at culture a little bit differently,” Vena says. “We’re not all always going to agree. But do we have a common goal? I think if you checked in this company, we do have a common goal.”
Enabling employees to make decisions “at the right level”— and make them quickly, whenever possible — helps keep the collective goal front and center, Vena believes. The increased speed of the decision-making has made a huge difference, Gehringer says, adding that prior UP leaders tended to lead a bit more democratically.
“Jim did away with all of that. He didn’t do it in a way where he made all the decisions — Jim wants you to run your own business, to make your own decisions,” Gehringer says. “I don’t know if anybody outside the company gets to see that, but he empowers.”
What non-UPers also might not see: Vena’s desire to see things through different lenses and consider perspectives other than his own, and his compassion.
“He has deep convictions about giving people second chances,” Hamann says. “Mistakes don’t have to be a fatal flaw.”
To hear Vena tell it, second chances are as much about the railroad getting better, and quicker, than they are about compassion.
“There are times when you have to be slow and methodical with a decision, but those times are far and few between,” he says. “If you’re looking at ways to move ahead, once in a while, you’re going to make a mistake — learn from it and move ahead.”
And move ahead, UP has. For the most recent quarter ended Sept. 30, the railroad posted its best-ever quarterly freight revenue (excluding fuel surcharge) and an operating ratio of 59.2, an improvement of 110 basis points. Meanwhile, freight-car velocity (up 8%), locomotive productivity (up 4%) and terminal dwell (up 9%) all improved compared with the same 2024 period. So did UP’s reportable personal injury and reportable derailment rates.
“Our third-quarter results serve as a proof point that we are successfully executing on our strategy,” Vena said on Oct. 23. “We have a historic opportunity with the Norfolk Southern to create America’s first transcontinental railroad. As we work towards regulatory approval, our team is focused and driving continued improvements in our pursuit of what’s possible.”
To Vena, a UP-NS combination would make a lot of things possible. Announced on July 29, the deal — which UP-NS had been discussing since March — is expected to result in $2.75 billion in annualized synergies and economies.
It also would create the first U.S. transcontinental railroad network, connecting connect over 50,000 route miles from the East Coast to the West Coast. The combined railroad would link about 100 ports and nearly every corner of North America, transforming the U.S. supply chain.
The combined company would deliver faster, more comprehensive freight service to U.S. shippers by eliminating interchange delays, opening new routes, expanding intermodal services and reducing distance and transit time on key rail corridors, Vena and NS CEO Mark George said when announcing the deal.
In December 2024, Vena told the UP board that merging with another Class I was something he thought was “the best way” to move the company and the country forward.
“There’s no way that a country like the United States of America should have a transportation system that competes against trucks — especially on the intermodal side, especially on the container side, especially on the freight side that’s less than truckload — and you don’t operate across the country,” Vena says. “You’re limiting that capability to compete. I always thought [a merger] was the best way to move ahead.”
It was a matter, then, of finding the right partner, a partner that had “the same vision of what was possible,” Vena says.
UP-NS told the Surface Transportation Board they intend to file the merger application on or before Jan. 29, 2026.
“We’re hoping to have it in before Dec. 1,” Vena says.
At the earliest, the UP-NS deal could be consummated in early 2027.
“[UP-NS] is good for America. It’s good for our customers,” Vena says. “We guaranteed a job for life for every unionized [UP] employee on the day the merger is approved, and we did that because we know we can grow the business.”
The deal also would enable UP customers to “compete and provide better products to the end user,” Vena says. UP would be able to move goods across the country without making so many hand-offs to other transportation providers.
“Going through Chicago today, there’s going to be close to 1,000 containers that have to be trucked between one railroad and the other because the railroads don’t directly work with each other,” he says.
The case for UP-NS is compelling, Vena believes. But the STB will have a lot to consider. For one thing, UP-NS would be the first deal under the 2001 merger rules, which require a combination to “enhance competition,” a term that hasn’t been defined, as transportation analyst Hatch notes.
Meanwhile, shippers, railroads and the communities UP-NS serve will weigh in on the deal, and some will seek concessions. Vena says he’s not overly concerned.
“This is an end-to-end merger with a very small amount of overlap,” he says. “In fact, it’s such a small amount of overlap, there is only a handful of customers that are going to go from two railroads to one. We have guaranteed that anybody that goes from two to one, we will open it up so they still continue to have an option or two. Beyond that, what is it is that somebody would ask for?”
Any number of things, potentially. Vena bristles at the notion. Particularly if railroads are doing the asking.
“Every railroad in the U.S. has the capacity to spend their money to do what they have to do to compete,” he says. “And if some of the things they need to do to complete is to build into customers, then build into customers if you want to compete.”
The way UP plans to do to connect LyondellBasell’s polymer plant in Bay City, Texas, to the Class I’s Angleton Subdivision, Vena says. UP has proposed constructing and operating 5 miles of rail line in southcentral Matagorda County, Texas, according to a petition filed in September with the STB. The project would strengthen LyondellBasell’s position in the region by providing it with a second competitive rail option, UP officials believe.
“Again, the biggest competition railroads have for the majority of business they have are trucks — it’s not other railroads,” Vena says. “What the STB should be looking at is how we move that ahead, and is it good for our country and good for our customers.”
Regardless, Vena knows there will be bumps in the merger road ahead. Not that he’d avoid a road with a pothole or detour or two. Not when he’s sure he’s on the right path. Besides, where would the challenge be in steering clear?
“The easy way forward in life would have been to keep Union Pacific operating the way it has been, ride it out for a few years, and enjoy the view out this window,” Vena says from behind the desk in his downtown Omaha office, gesturing toward the city’s skyline. “That’s just not me, OK? I look at what’s next. If we, as an industry, stay static, we could get left behind.”
And behind is the last place the forward-thinking Vena plans to visit.
“I think he’s the epitome of the American Dream — his coming from a migrant family in Italy to Canada, and starting at the railroad from the very bottom, raising himself from level to level, up to leading the largest Class I,” Gehringer says. “And he’s still driven. I can see how much pride he derives from what he’s accomplished.”
Email comments or questions to pat.foran@tradepress.com.