In 1970, the merger of four American railroads: Northern Pacific; Great Northern; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; and Spokane, Portland & Seattle created a new super railroad – Burlington Northern (BN) – with a 25,000-mile network, spanning the northern and central United States. For the next twenty-five years, BN was one of United States’ premier railroads.
In its first decade BN had its hands full, paring down duplicate lines and transforming the individual lines of its predecessor railroads into a single cohesive network, as well as investing in the explosive growth of Powder River Basin coal shipments. By the early 1980s though, BN had become an established successful railroad, with its distinctive green and black livery. The BN of the 1990s experienced further growth, notably in intermodal, grain and coal traffic.
Burlington Northern: The Final Years is a photographic record of the last dozen years of the independent BN operation, before the merger with Santa Fe to form BNSF in 1995. It is comprised of high quality original photographs from Mike Danneman, taken at locations all around the BN network and in all kinds of weather. Over 150 photographs. 96 pages.