BNSF Railway: Buffett's $44 Billion Bet and the Swinomish Trespass Ruling

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BNSF Railway runs about 33,400 miles of track across 28 states and three Canadian provinces with 36,000 employees and more than 8,000 locomotives. Its roots reach back to the 12-mile Aurora Branch in Illinois in 1849, but the modern company formed after Burlington Northern and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe announced their merger in 1994 and outlasted a Union Pacific bidding war in early 1995. When Union Pacific then bought Southern Pacific, regulators gave BNSF about 3,500 miles of trackage rights over UP lines. A planned 1999 merger with Canadian National collapsed after the Surface Transportation Board imposed a 15-month moratorium on major mergers. In 2010 Berkshire Hathaway, already holding about 22 percent, bought the rest in a deal valuing BNSF at $44 billion, Berkshire's largest acquisition.

BNSF earned over $25 billion in revenue and $5.5 billion in net income in 2022. It hauls Powder River Basin coal in unit trains, serves more than 1,500 grain elevators, and runs 100 to 150 trains a day on the Southern Transcon between Southern California and Chicago, double-tracked and triple-tracked at Cajon Pass. It absorbed the Montana Rail Link between 2022 and 2024 and turned aside a 2025 push from Ancora Holdings for a CSX merger in favor of joint intermodal service. A 2023 Federal Railroad Administration report found a gap between leadership's safety claims and workers' experience, and in 2024 BNSF furloughed 360 mechanical workers. In June 2024 a federal judge ordered it to pay $400 million to the Swinomish tribe for running far more traffic across the reservation than a 1991 easement allowed.

• BNSF carries Boeing 737 fuselages by rail from Wichita, Kansas to Renton, Washington.
• A commemorative SD70MAC, No. 9647, painted in merged Santa Fe and BN colors was nicknamed the Vomit Bonnet.
• New terminals include the $1.5 billion Barstow International Gateway and the 4,300-acre Surprise Logistics Center in Arizona.
• In 2014 OSHA ordered BNSF to pay over $526,000 for firing workers at its Havre, Montana terminal who reported injuries.
• A 2023 lawsuit by WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project ties BNSF trains to 63 grizzly bear deaths in Montana since 2008.