About Us

Tracks to the Past

The BNSF Railway was created through the September 22, 1995, merger of Burlington Northern Inc. and Santa Fe Pacific Corp. and is the product of some 390 different railroad lines that merged or were acquired during more than 150 years.

While many different railroads combined to form the modern BNSF Railway, all shared one or more common features:

• Pioneering Spirit — laying hundreds of miles of track over previously undeveloped land, overcoming great geographic obstacles and challenges
• Innovative Thinking:
• Equipment — AC traction locomotives, tri-level auto rack cars, land-bridge container trains to link both Asia and Europe and other rolling stock specifically designed for various products carried on BNSF
• Supporting technology — the printing telegraph, radio dispatching, centralized traffic control and, more recently, a football field-sized, data-driven Network Operations Center
• Services — in-route mail sorting, intermodal services and new business tools for specific markets, such as an industry leading grain logistics system
• Efficiency — applying the energy efficiency of rail transit to supply shippers with cost savings and speed. The people who built BNSF are a unique breed, blending the forward-thinking of dreamers with the pragmatism of results-oriented business leaders. This heritage played a central role in settling and growing the American West, and is helping shippers achieve better business performance in the 21st Century.

This year’s BNSF Railway Special covers part of the territory of BNSF predecessors The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) and The Great Northern Railway (GN).

CB&Q’s rapid expansion after the Civil War was based on sound financial management, dominated by John Murray Forbes of Boston, who was in turn assisted by Charles Perkins, president of the company from 1881 to 1901. The railroad eventually reached Denver, its western terminus, and reached east to the Chicago, Kansas City and St. Louis gateways. CB&Q lines also went to Omaha, Nebraska, and St. Joseph, Missouri. Always anxious to employ the latest technology, CB&Q operated the first printing telegraph in 1910 and in 1915 was the first railroad to use train radio. Later, in 1927, the CB&Q was one of the first to utilize centralized traffic control. Perhaps CB&Q’s best known achievement took place in 1934, when the railroad introduced the Pioneer Zephyr, America’s first diesel-powered streamlined passenger train.

On May 26, the CB&Q staged one of the greatest transportation events ever — a 1,000-mile record-breaking, non-stop run from Denver to the World’s Fair in Chicago, reaching speeds of more than 100 miles per hour. The Zephyr was the forerunner of thousands of diesels that, after World War II, replaced steam locomotives on virtually every railroad in the country. The epic completion of Great Northern Railway’s transcontinental line to the Pacific in 1893 and the creation of Burlington Northern Railroad some 77 years later were in a very real sense the fulfillment of one man’s dreams. That man was James Jerome Hill, “The Empire Builder.” GN was begun in 1857 as the Minnesota & Pacific Railroad Company when the Minnesota legislature, eager for rails in its territory, granted a charter to “construct a railroad in the direction of the Pacific.” In 1862, the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad Company acquired the rights to the railroad after they had been forfeited to the state. The St. Paul & Pacific ultimately also failed, and after foreclosure in 1879, the properties were acquired by Hill and three partners and reorganized as the St. Paul,Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway Company, with St. Paul businessman Hill as its general manager.

The Journey Continues

Today, BNSF Railway operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America, with 32,000 route miles covering 28 states and two Canadian provinces.

The railway is among the world’s top transporters of intermodal traffic, serves more grainproducing regions than any other American railroad, transports the mineral components of many of the products we depend on daily, and hauls enough coal to generate more than 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States. It also hauls about 10 percent of new vehicles sold, and abut 1 billion canned goods each year.