feature story Railroads
Born of Need
The legacy of BNSF in Fort
Worth can be traced back to the
year 1880, when Fort Worth was
a frontier town of about 9,000
people and Texas had a rail network of approximately 700 miles.
Former Kansas politician Col.
Warren H.H. Lawrence had
moved to the city in 1868, bringing with him an interest in railroads. He visualized a route from
the Gulf of Mexico to the Rocky
Mountains and even introduced a
bill to the Texas Legislature encouraging a connection with any
Colorado railroad. Though the
bill was vetoed, Lawrence continued to pursue his goal and, working with other leading citizens,
he drew up a charter for the Fort
Worth & Denver City Railway
Company, which became effective May 26, 1873. The charter
specified that the company would
build and operate a line at or near
Fort Worth, where it would form
a junction with the Texas and Pacific and head northwest, in the
direction of Denver. Construction began in 1881.
The BNSF of today is the culmination of years of pioneering
spirit and determination by the
kind of entrepreneurs who set22
www.ntc-dfw.org
TOP: BNSF Railway continues to roll out new, more fuel-efficient engines.
CENTER: In 2013, rail saw increased demand from a recovering economy.
tled the western U.S. The oldest
of the BNSF predecessors were
both founded in 1849: the Aurora
Branch Line and the Pacific Railroad of Missouri. The youngest
predecessor in the BNSF family
tree is the Burlington Northern Railroad (BN), which was
created in 1970 with the merger of five other railroads, and,
in 1980, the Frisco was added
to the BN.
Winter/Spring 2015
“ Berkshire’s
$34 billion
investment in
BNSF is a huge
bet on that
company and
the railroad
industry.”
– Warren Buffett
But BNSF is far from being a collection of times gone by. Instead, the
railway and its predecessors have a
history of innovation that has moved
progress through the decades. For
example, Santa Fe developed the first
land-bridge container train, linking
Asia with Europe using connecting
rail lines in the eas