BNSF celebrates 10th anniversary of merger: this year marks the 10th anniversary of the merger between Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Pacific, which created today's Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway

International Railway Journal, July, 2005 by Matthew Rose

WE are proud of our accomplishments in the 10 years since the formation of BNSF. With our commitment to safety, for example, BNSF has become a much safer place to work. Our ratio of injuries per 200,000 hours worked has dropped from 2.72 in 1995 to 1.50 last year, a decrease of about 45%. Equally important, our severity ratio--lost and restricted workdays per 200,000 hours worked--has dropped by a similar percentage.

Other business initiatives during our first 10 years have helped us maintain the fluidity of our system during a period of unprecedented growth in demand for our services. In 2004, we handled 10.3% more units (freight wagons, containers and trailers) than in 2003. During the first quarter of this year, we handled 9.2% more units than in the first quarter of 2004, with only a 3.6% increase in the average number of wagons on line. As we look ahead, key challenges for BNSF, and indeed, all railways, will include attracting and retaining workers and investment in the infrastructure required to accommodate anticipated growth in the global economy.

BNSF believes that an organisation's culture affects its ability to attract and retain workers. Shortly after the merger that produced BNSF, we recognised that the creation of a new company provided us with the opportunity to formulate a new corporate culture. Our senior leadership group developed a vision statement and a group of shared values that continue to guide our daily activities.

In 2002, we developed our leadership model to help our leaders apply the precepts of our vision and values to their daily activities. We've integrated the leadership model into our performance management process (PMP) in order to hold each other accountable and to ensure that the actions of our leaders are consistent with the words of the leadership model and our vision and values.

We are seeking to develop BNSF as a strategically aligned organisation. Strategic alignment starts with our mission and builds on our vision and values. Those in turn drive our strategy, initiatives and targets, and our personal objectives. The result is a group of outcomes, or evidences of success, linked to our vision and aligned with our key constituencies--customers, shareholders, employees, and the communities we serve.

Strategic alignment of the BNSF organisation with our vision and values and leadership model is continuing the development of BNSF's corporate culture to help us leverage the skills and talents of BNSF people. We expect to hire about 3500 employees this year, about the same number as in 2004. The cultural integration of those new employees is an important part of our long-term success.

Another critical factor in the continued success of any railway is its ability to invest to accommodate growth. The shift in the North American economy from manufacturing and production to consumption has put a premium on BNSF's ability to add capacity. While we have made substantial capital investments since 1995, we also are exploring ways of gaining additional capacity throughout the supply chain, especially for international intermodal business, where growth has been most dramatic.

Last year, we added more than 400 locomotives to our fleet, and plan to add another 285 this year. That will bring our mainline locomotive fleet to more than 4800 for 2005. Equipment additions span all of our major lines of business. We're adding 3000 covered grain hoppers, 1500 aluminium rapid-discharge coal wagons, as well as 1200 freight wagons of various types for industrial products. We will add 7700 platforms to our double-stack container wagon fleet this year, primarily to accommodate growth in international traffic.

By the end of this year, we will have more than doubled our stack-wagon capacity since 1998.

Infrastructure investment also is critical, especially on routes most affected by the surge in intermodal traffic--intermodal revenue tonne-km were up almost 13% on BNSF last year, and increased more than 14% in the first quarter of this year.

Our intermodal facilities are expanding at both ends of our Chicago-Los Angeles main line as well as at other key locations such as the Dallas/Fort Worth area and Memphis. By the end of this year less than 160km of that 3540km Chicago-Los Angeles route will be single track. We've begun installing third main tracks at some locations.

In addition to these investments, we're working with importers and exporters, truckers, marine terminal operators, ports and steamship lines to try to leverage existing capacity in the supply chain.

We're encouraging ports and receivers of freight to move toward night and weekend operations. The PierPass programme recently established by Southern California ports is an example of the ports' progressive response to the need to leverage port capacity at other than conventional daytime, weekday hours. The Waterfront Coalition, an industry group composed primarily of importers and exporters; the West Coast Marine Terminal Operators; and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union all are active supporters of PierPass. It's the kind of programme that holds great promise for addressing capacity issues.