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Rush Loving on the Buffett-BNSF deal |
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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, I ran into one of my Wall Street sources on the morning commuter train, and he told me Penn Central's chairman was confiding to the Interstate Commerce Commission that the railroad was in trouble. I got busy looking at their books, and after I'd been at it three weeks or so Warren Buffett, a man I'd never heard of, sent a note to one of my colleagues, Carol Loomis, suggesting that Penn Central's numbers looked fishy. She passed it on to me.
I found the note in my files when I was finishing the manuscript for The Men Who Loved Trains. Other than Fortune, I think Buffet might have been the only person besides a few Penn Central insiders and their accountants and lawyers who sensed a problem.
So, he's been looking at railroads a long time — nearly 40 years. -------
See Rush Loving Jr.’s plan for Amtrak in the March 2009 issue of Trains. A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, he served as chief spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget in the Carter White House and has been a consultant to numerous transportation companies.
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