About Burlington Northern
The Burlington Northern Railroad was an U.S. railroad from its inception in 1970 as part of a four-road merger until it itself merged with Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in 1995, forming BNSF, the identity crisis on wheels.
The first groundwork for BN was laid in the early twentieth century by railroad baron James J. Hill, who controlled the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railways (which, in turn, jointly owned a majority stake of Chicago, Burlington & Quincy). After four failures, his dream was realized when the ICC approved a merger of those three along with joint GN/NP dependent Spokane, Portland & Seattle. Merger day was March 2, 1970.
BN purchased the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway (Frisco) in 1980, expanding its system yet again. At BN's height, it laid claim to rails from Seattle to Minnesota to Florida and could boast a network of over 29,000 miles. BN hauled diverse traffic, from grain, to timber, to intermodal, to coal, and pioneered several important developments in modern railroading while doing so - the finest of all being the use of alternating current in locomotive power transmission.
Western coal traffic boomed in the eighties, putting BN in an extremely comfortable financial position. Indeed, BN never went into receivership and paid a dividend every quarter, following a trend set by predecessor CB&Q over 100 years before BN's birth.
After a lengthy and costly battle with Union Pacific, Burlington Northern purchased Santa Fe in 1995 for about $4 billion and merged the two roads into a new system: BNSF.
In this group, you are invited to post your photos of Burlington Northern equipment, people, documents, buildings, and anything else you might have related to the big road. Post-merger stuff is fine as long as it does not contain any ridiculously obvious BNSF elements, is set in former BN territory, etc. Patched BN locomotives are okay. Other railroads' equipment and operations on BN track is also permitted. Exercise your discretion when uploading.
The only items discouraged for submission are videos and model pictures.
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