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Check out what Trains staff and industry experts say
about railroads, train-watching, and more, in our blog.
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By Rush Loving, Jr. I can't think of a better owner for BNSF than Warren Buffett. As I argue in my book The Men Who Loved Trains , good managers and good owners are those people who love their businesses and believe in building value in a company. That's Warren Buffett's hallmark. Not only that, but he obviously has an innate love for the railroad industry. It's ironic, but in the early spring of 1970, when I was a young Fortune writer...
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I’ve been puzzled by the buyout of Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Warren Buffet has said many times that railroads make lousy long-term investments. “It [railroading] will never be a fabulous business,” he said once again last year. “It’s too capital intensive.” Then the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway turns around and makes the biggest investment of his life by buying the 77 percent of BNSF (parent of BNSF Railway) that Berkshire doesn’t already...
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The towns along Minnesota Northern Railroad’s Warroad Subdivision could form the backdrop for Garrison Keillor’s stories, or provide set locations for the Coen Brothers’ movie Fargo . Tall gray grain elevators provide the only vertical relief; each fall, they fill with the bounty of the fields that stretch north into Manitoba, and south until they transition to marshes on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. In summer, Warroad sees its share of visitors...
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The world is at war. Our nation has just emerged from the Great Depression and is fighting for its survival as a free people. Yet, life still goes on. Santa Fe’s twice-weekly, all-Pullman Super Chief, headed from Chicago to Los Angeles, is stopped for servicing at Albuquerque, N.M. Water and diesel fuel from tank cars are being pumped into the bowels of the twin locomotives. Passengers step out for a break; some walk up to the head end. Everyone wears...
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Talk about awesome. Talk about vertigo. I’m at the side of a dirt road in Iowa, looking straight up. And what I see is weathered spider steel on the right and massive concrete superstructure on the left. Engineering wonders, a century apart. Either one is enough to take your breath away. And here they are, side by side, reaching toward the sky. This is what I’d set out to see this morning, only much better than I’d imagined. I was in Omaha for the...
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I don’t harbor much hope that our $13 billion commitment to high speed rail ($8 billion now and $1 billion each of the next five years) will be spent rationally. The Federal Railroad Administration is analyzing applications for more than $50 billion in projects. Because there will be more losers than winners, political log-rolling is almost guaranteed. But wouldn’t it be nice to put the money to work where it would do the most good? In that regard...
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Imagine that you’re the VP-operations for a big U.S. railroad. One day your office door opens and standing there is the person you least like to see, the VP-law. He or she sits down uninvited, right in front of your face, and says, shape up, Bunky, or we’ll be paying Amtrak instead of the other way around. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the sensational improvement in on-time performance by Amtrak trains over the past two years. My sources...
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In Part 1, you read the challenge put to the Lexington Group in Transportation History: Name the men who really got it right in railroading the past half century. In Part 2, you read the picks of the moderators of this discussion, David DeBoer and Jim McClellan. Now it’s my turn. Once again, the rules: Nobody is eligible who left the railroad scene before 1960, or who still runs a railroad. I think Dave and Jim did an outstanding job framing the environment...
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In the first installment, I told you about the question posed to the Lexington Group in Transportation History by Jim McClellan and David DeBoer. They described the challenges facing railroad leaders in the past half century, grouping those challenges under four headings: new markets and distribution systems; technology and productivity; finance; and industry structure and public policy. The best CEOs made breakthrough contributions to the industry...
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Who indeed? At the recent meeting of the Lexington Group in Transportation History, Jim McClellan and David DeBoer grabbed this braintwister and wrestled it to the ground. They each recited their own list of winners (they agreed on five names and went separate ways on the other five). I called this a braintwister, because how do you even go about this task? No slouches in the brains department, Jim (retired as Norfolk Southern’s corporate strategist...
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Almost buried in a tiny corner of Amtrak.com is a treasure trove of financial and operations information about our passenger train railroad. Do this: Go to the bottom of Amtrak’s home page and click on Inside Amtrak, then Other Reports, and finally Monthly Performance Reports. I chose the most recent month, July 2009. Maybe you don’t want to slog through those 85 pages. In that case, let me entertain you with a 10-question quiz. Answers follow. 1...
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Vesuvius is the mountain in Italy that popped its top in 79 AD and buried Pompeii in volcanic ash. There’s a Vesuvius in Virginia, too, nestled in the Shenandoah Valley, and it had an eruption as well. The second eruption of Vesuvius occurred at a B&B about 15 years ago. The soon-to-be-former art director of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine popped his top at an editorial planning session. Criticized about some aspects of his recent redesign...
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Buried deep within the language of the Passenger Rail Investment & Improvement Act of 2008, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush 11 months ago, is some startling language that could affect Amtrak service four years from now. It boils down to this: By Oct. 13, 2013, any train or route of less than 750 miles outside of the Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor must be state-funded, or it will not be operated. Did you know that? I didn...
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Over time, I’ve probably read 10,001 railroad accident reports. Virtually all come down to mechanical failure, the elements, or one person’s poor judgment or incompetence. Very, very few involve the stupidity of an entire five-person train crew. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the doozy of them all. Come with me down memory lane and relive the Night of the Big Sleep. We’re on the Rock Island Lines in Oklahoma, on the Memphis, Tenn.-Tucumcari...
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It's safe for me to say that Powder River Basin coal from eastern Wyoming changed the face of American railroading. The revenues from hauling this coal kept several Midwest railroads solvent. More important, that coal revenue financed the rebuilding and upgrading of railroad infrastructure in the western two-thirds of the country. Today you can easily forget that all this didn't just happen. People made it happen, people like Lou Menk, the...
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