merger worked through the regulatory process. So confident the deal would be approved, the company began repainting their locomotives into a new unified paint scheme that would allow the future railroad to be called the SPSF Railway. Immediately combined were the company's extensive non-railroad holdings. Santa Fe had holdings in gold mines in California and Nevada, and owned part of oil and gas complex in California valued at close to $2 billion. Southern Pacific owned more California real estate than any other corporation, with huge amounts of forest land and prime urban property including 200 acres in Downtown San Francisco and more than 150 acres near Disneyland, estimated to be worth as much as $5 billion. The Justice Department and competing railroads strongly criticized the merger, but industry analysts largely expected the deal to be approved. In an argument for the merger, John J. Schmidt, the head of Santa Fe Southern Pacific, said in testimony in front of the ICC board that since 1982 Southern Pacific had either lost money or made very little profit each year, and suggested that Santa Fe was not financially healthy enough to survive independently. After the testimony, ICC staff recommended to the board that the merger be approved, with some conditions that he said the staff believed would solve the competition problem. The company was stunned on July 24, 1986, when the ICC board rejected the proposed merger, saying that the anti-competitive problems outweighed the public benefits of joining the rail systems. Specifically, in the 4-1 decision, the ICC cited that the railroads had extensive parallel operations in California and across the Southwest, and that merging the lines would have a “substantial adverse effect” on competition. The company quickly moved to strike a deal with competitor Union Pacific to grant them rights to use some of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific tracks. The company also started the process of selling off some of its non-railroad businesses. After those changes, on December 9, 1986, the company appealed the ICC decision. On April 20, 1987, Santa Fe Southern Pacific Chairman and CEO John J. Schmidt resigned under pressure, reportedly ousted by the company's board of directors who were displeased with the way the merger was handled. Ultimately, despite the changes, on June 30, 1987, the ICC declined to reconsider the merger and orders the company to sell one or both of the rail lines within