Burlington Northern Railroad

Burlington Northern Railroad

Burlington Northern Railroad trackage (shown in green) at the time of the merger with the ATSF.
With three of four predecessor railroad locomotives in a five-unit consist, BN 5738, a GE U33C, departs Livingston, Montana in August 1971.
Overview
Headquarters	Saint Paul, Minnesota (1970–1981) Seattle, Washington (1981–1988) Fort Worth, Texas (1988–1996)
Reporting mark	BN
Locale	Pacific Northwest, Midwestern United States, Central United States
Dates of operation	1970; 54 years ago (1970)–1996; 28 years ago (1996)
Predecessor	Great Northern Railway Northern Pacific Railway Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (all merged by March 2, 1970) St. Louis-San Francisco Railway (merged 1980) Colorado and Southern Railway (merged 1981) Fort Worth and Denver Railway (merged 1982)
Successor	BNSF Railway
Technical
Track gauge	4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
Length	27,000 miles (43,000 km)

The Burlington Northern Railroad (reporting mark BN) was a United States-based railroad company formed from a merger of four major U.S. railroads. Burlington Northern operated between 1970 and 1995.

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 acquired 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 in 2009 by Berkshire Hathaway,^[1] which is controlled by investor Warren Buffett.