Word: rails
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...handle the surge in business, BNSF is spending $1.9 billion on capital improvements this year, and it plans to invest an additional $1.4 billion in 2005. Those sums will add to the railway's sizable investments since the old Burlington Northern and Santa Fe rails came together in 1995. Since that merger, the company has put down 600 new miles of rail, at $2 million a mile. With delays persisting along the busy transcon route, crews are out in the barren expanses of the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle finishing up a two-year project to double track 100 miles of rail...
...locomotives haven't changed in two decades," he says, "most people have not seen an ops center like ours, not even at NASA in Houston." Automated readers, located every 30 miles along the 33,000-mile system, scan the bar codes of passing cars and locomotives--basically the rail version of a toll tag--and wirelessly transmit that information. Customers can log on to the company's website to track shipments in near real time or get the data sent to their BlackBerries...
...railway's L.A.-to-Chicago transcontinental route is humming with mile-long BNSF trains, their railcars stacked two containers high with Chinese-made toys and togs, purses and plasma TVs. The town of Colton, Calif., east of Los Angeles, is now the busiest spot in the West for rail traffic, thanks to a tsunami of transpacific trade--$1.3 billion for BNSF alone this year--arriving at ports from San Diego to Seattle. "At the end of the day," says Rose, "all roads lead to China." Particularly railroads: BNSF's China-related business has doubled in the past six years...
...take the system to the next level, even if that means tagging every piece of lumber it hauls. "Whatever interests Wal-Mart fascinates the hell out of me," says Campbell. But BNSF is taking the technology beyond the Wal-Mart initiative to use RFID to identify deterioration in rail equipment--eliminating mechanical accidents before they happen...
...Rail's Big Comeback Rising imports from China and improved technology spell a boom for railroads like BNSF...