LNG in RR cars....this has to make Warren Buffett happy. Didn’t he buy up all of those LNG transport cars, during 0s reign, in hopes that he’d get the freight contracts?
I don’t even know if he/his company even owns them, anymore.
https://www.railwayage.com/freight/class-i/matt-rose-less-is-not-better/
“It was a very lucky day for me and for Berkshire Hathaway when I met Matt Rose,” said Chairman Warren Buffett when Rose’s pending retirement was announced. “Under Matt’s management, BNSF has become a major source of profit and pride for Berkshire. And, as a citizen, Matt has been an exemplar for corporate leadership.”
Rose and Vantuono met at BNSF’s Washington, D.C. office in late November for a wide-ranging interview in which Rose reflected on his career and talked about the industry’s future.
Vantuono: You joined BN as director of automotive terminals.
Rose: Yes. I actually came out of the trucking industry. I joined BN in 1993. We merged on Sept. 22, 1995 with Santa Fe. The CEO, Rob Krebs, came from Santa Fe, the smaller railroad of the two. When I was 38, Rob told me that he wanted me to be the next CEO of the company. I laughed, and he said, “Why are you laughing?” I said, “Because I’ve never run a railroad.” He said, “Well, I’m going to change that tomorrow. You’re going to become the Chief Operating Officer of this company.” And I laughed even more. Sure enough to his word, he did that, and then a year later he named me President. Then a year later, on Dec. 7, 2000 he named me CEO. He stayed one year, and then left. I really was not qualified in the least to run this railroad.
Vantuono: I remember you telling me about this conversation nine years ago when you were Railroader of the Year.
Rose: Same story. Still wasn’t qualified!
Vantuono: How about now?
Rose: Oh, I’m qualified now!
Vantuono: Obviously! So, in the past 25 years, you’ve witnessed a lot.
Rose: I’ve thought of my career as having three different cycles. The first cycle was 2000. I’ll start with safety, as I always like to do. We were really struggling with safety as an industry. A lot of derailments. People just can’t fathom the amount of head-on and rear-end collisions, non-accidental releases, injuries, amputations and deaths that were occurring. Safety was not very good. And we were not growing as an industry; we were really struggling to grow. It was the dot-com era. When I would go to Wall Street, all people wanted to talk about was technology stocks, internet stocks. Everybody was going to point-and-click. No more bricks and mortar. Everyone was going to buy stuff over the internet. The returns of the industry were mid-single-digits. And yet we were spending a lot of capital. There was an enormous amount of frustration, with customers saying, “We’ve got to re-regulate the railroads.” But the regulators, I think, almost felt a little bit of empathy for us because our returns were, quite frankly, subpar. And we would say, “Look at all this money, and we’re only making 7.5% on our investment,” and so no harm was done.
PART OF ARTICLE...written be William C. Vantuono...December 10,2018
In any event, he still doesn’t think it’s fair that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.