True. And it's the chances of railroad mergers that means that Burlington, Iowa is remembered in the first letter in one of the largest railroads in the USA, presumably so that neither of the two "Northerns" (Northern Pacific and Great Northern) that merged into Burlington Northern wasn't perceived to be the "winner" of the merger of the NP, GN, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and Spokane, Portland & Seattle.

Contrast this with the Union Pacific: UP + anything else = UP. Although I read recently that when UP merged Southern Pacific, they legally merged UP into SP, then renamed the resultant entity Union Pacific, so technically it was SP that merged UP, not the other way around.