32 years 1978-2010 BN/BNSF. That coal in MT and WY is why I had a job.

Burlington Northern is my favorite railroad. As a teenager they let ride with them when they would switch at the grain mill.

old school GE, EMD, BN, and tons of info/footage..Thanks for sharing!

God damn, those SD40-2s and U30Cs are so...graceful.

I was a Cartographer for an aerial survey company in Mpls. mapping the route for this coal route

Burlington northern was approached by Edgar j. Kaiser to haul all the coal from the elk valley until Canadian Pacific did an end run promising a dedicated branch line to the fording coal mine and a branch line and new superport in Roberts bank and rotary dumpers in north Vancouver, the operation is projected to last until 2056

@ 1:49 What a cool looking train and bridge !

Glad the narrator explained its coal coming from big sky country.. I thought it was the awsome background music

Orin Line is now three and four tracks wide, running joint BNSF and UPRR trains. Average weight of a DP four pack is around 20,000 ton. A lot of coal for the Midwest!!

3:58 Oklahoma Gas & Electric :P Those gondolas passed through my town (in Kansas) until about 1994 when they switched to the coalporters. At first they ran down Santa Fe's Transcon from K.C. to Red Rock, OK with a mix of BN and SF engines. Then they changed the contract to joint UP/ATSF and started running them down the Topeka sub behind just SF engines at first, then UP engines. Now since the contract has changed, BNSF diesels once again pull them down the Transcon.

the rails in Powder River Areas are double tracked now UP get this coal too

Wait a minute. That was not the BN map on the 70's. That was after the Frisco acquisition in Nov, 1980.

Does anyone recall the television spot for coal that aired following the first gasoline crisis? It showed a representative sized map of the Unites States based on the amount of coal America had in the ground. It then showed a map of the oil producing Arab countries that was sized according to the amount of oil they had. The U.S. towered over the OPEC nations by comparison.

ow this is sweet! Anything BN like this is sweet.

Guess this hasn't aged well lately for the BNSF. Well, the "coal boom" was nice while it lasted.

That has to be Wyoming's Powder River Basin that is being shown in the BN film.

Who'da think that this connection would become the countries busiest coal route today

And 2/3 of it funnels thru the Port of Vancouver B.C. which is CLOSED currently as the ILWU is on strike , I bet that would result in a phone call from Joe to Justin 😮

Old School

Isnt this the Powder river basin they're talking about here.

More sense than wind and solar.

flashback city. old school is good school. just give it to me straight. take your drunken wandering-tilt-angles and new-millennium wisecrack flicker-flash editing back to mtv and sundance and go squat. reality is forever.

The predecessor to ENRON tried to build a coal slurry pipeline from the coal fields to the southern power plants. The railroads interfered with their crossing of the right of ways and Enron sued them and WON...$400 MILLION in a trial that lasted over a year. UP and several others paid for their crimes.

Shhhh.. if Barry and Joe see this, they will close all of these mines... those that still exist that is.

what a CONTRAST to the penn central disaster of the exact same time... then again from the PC disaster we got conrail… then from there we got the staggers act (railroad deregulation)… maybe we should celebrate the festival of errors that was PC... without it I doubt there would have been any motivation for the gov to deregulate