Burlington Northern Railway

Burlington Northern Railroad

Burlington Northern Railroad system map at the time of the BNSF merger. BN lines are colored in green.
With three of four predecessor railroad locomotives in tow, GE U33C #5738 departs Livingston, MT in August 1971.
Reporting mark	BN
Locale	Pacific Northwest, Midwestern United States, Central United States
Dates of operation	1970–1996 (as BN)
Successor	Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway
Track gauge	4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
Length	27,000 miles (estimate)
Headquarters	St. Paul, MN (1970–1981), Fort Worth, TX (1988–1996)

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 1996.

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 purchased 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 by Berkshire Hathaway in 2009 which is controlled by investor Warren Buffett.

The Burlington Northern Railroad was the product of a March 2, 1970, merger of four major railroads—the Great Northern Railway, Northern Pacific Railway, Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad—as well as a few small jointly owned subsidiaries owned by the four. The merged railroad was initially going to be called Great Northern Pacific & Burlington Lines.

Although the four railroads shared common ownership (including the headquarters building in Saint Paul, Minnesota) from the days of the James J. Hill era, the four railroads previously had unsuccessfully attempted four mergers to unify the Hill Lines: 1896, 1901, 1927 and 1955. The merger was finally approved in 1970 even though a challenge occurred in the Supreme Court, which reversed the result of the 1904 Northern Securities ruling.