Last year, grain handlers like Roger Krueger had no kind words for Warren Buffett’s BNSF Railway Co. After record U.S. harvests, crops piled up all across the Midwest, with few rail cars available to get them to buyers because they were being used to ship more oil and coal.
It’s different now. While farmers are harvesting almost as much this year, the logjams are long gone, said Krueger, a vice president at the South Dakota Wheat Growers Association, a cooperative with 20 loading depots served by BNSF that are used to market all sorts of crops including corn and soybeans.
U.S. rail shipments of grain are the highest in five years, and costs are down from 2014, when delays could last more than two months and compounded the slumping value of crops that had nowhere to go, he said.
The really, really neat thing about this story? Free market capitalism. Can you imagine if the US government had been put in charge to "fix the railroad"? Three letters would say it all. O.M.G.
Practically none of BNSF’s grain-hauling is behind schedule this year, after the company laid a second set of tracks alongside a single rail line for a total of 90 miles (144 kilometers) west of Minot, North Dakota, and spent more on sidings and new signals to speed trains, said John Miller, chief of the railroad operator’s agriculture unit.
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