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The Burlington Northern Railroad was a United States-based railroad company formed from a merger of four major U.S. railroads. Burlington Northern operated between 1970 and 1996. Its historical lineage begins in the earliest days of railroading with the chartering in 1848 of the Chicago and Aurora Railroad, a direct ancestor line of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, which lends Burlington to the names of various merger-produced successors. Burlington Northern purchased the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway on December 31, 1996 to form the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (later renamed BNSF Railway), which was owned by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation. That corporation was purchased by Berkshire Hathaway in 2009〔http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091103/ap_on_bi_ge/us_berkshire_burlington_northern〕 which is controlled by investor Warren Buffett. ==History== The Burlington Northern Railroad was the product of a March 2, 1970, merger of four major railroads—the Great Northern Railway, Northern Pacific Railway, Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad—as well as a few small jointly owned subsidiaries owned by the four.〔For a pictorial survey of the BN's diesels from Day 1, see Olmsted, Robert P., "The Green Machines" (1986).〕 The merged railroad was initially going to be called Great Northern Pacific & Burlington Lines. Although the four railroads shared common ownership (including the headquarters building in Saint Paul, Minnesota) from the days of the James J. Hill era, the four railroads previously had unsuccessfully attempted four mergers to unify the Hill Lines: 1896, 1901, 1927 and 1955. Surprisingly the merger was finally approved in 1970 even though a challenge occurred in the Supreme Court, which reversed the result of the 1904 Northern Securities ruling. To further expand the Burlington Northern railroad, a single track was constructed in 1972 into the Powder River Basin to serve various coal mines. On November 21, 1980, the St. Louis - San Francisco Railway was acquired, giving the railroad trackage as far south into Florida. By 1981, however, the holding company of the railroad, Burlington Northern, Inc. relocated headquarters from Saint Paul, Minnesota to Seattle, Washington and spun off all non-rail operations to Burlington Resources in 1988. In 1971, BN/C&S/FW&D carried 64116 million revenue ton-miles of freight; in 1979 the total was 135004 million.〔Moody's Transportation Manual 1981〕 Most of the increase was Powder River coal from Wyoming, a fount of traffic unprecedented in United States railroad history, and one which BN had to itself until 1984. The Burlington Northern, along with handling freight trains, briefly operated inter-city passenger trains. The BN had begun operation just a matter of weeks before the end of service of the ''California Zephyr'', which had been operated by the CB&Q, in conjunction with the Denver & Rio Grande Western and Western Pacific railroads, and continued to operate the ''North Coast Limited'', ''Empire Builder'' and ''Denver Zephyr'' until Amtrak took over intercity passenger service in May 1971, thus becoming the last "new" Class I railroad to operate its own passenger trains. The BN also operated a commuter line inherited from the CB&Q from Chicago Union Station to the western suburb of Aurora, Illinois. On September 22, 1995, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway merged with the Burlington Northern to create the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. However, the merger was not official until December 31, 1996, when a common dispatching system was established, Santa Fe's non-union dispatchers were unionized and the implementation of Santa Fe's train identification codes systemwide. On January 24, 2005, the railroad shortened its name to BNSF Railway. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Burlington Northern Railroad」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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