By Justin Franz 

KANSAS CITY — Kansas City Southern announced Thursday that its shareholders will now vote on September 3, on whether or not to accept an offer to merge from Canadian National. The vote had originally been scheduled for today, but got pushed back two weeks after the U.S. Surface Transportation Board did not rule on a request to let CN put KCS into trust — a key provision of the proposal that could make or break the deal. 

KCS officials said they were confident that the STB would approve the trust but wanted to ensure shareholders had that information before the vote. By letting CN put KCS into a trust, the Canadian road could pay shareholders before the STB actually approved the deal. If the STB were to eventually reject the deal, then CN would have to sell KCS out of trust. 

Scorn suitor Canadian Pacific, who has now tried twice to merge with KCS, praised the decision and said that they were confident the CN-KCS deal would never happen.