Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that Burlington Northern Santa Fe started out as James Hill's Great Northern Railway. The Great Northern was the only transcontinental railroad built without subsidies or land grants, the antithesis of Buffet's crony capitalism. Hill's construction of that railroad is one of the lost chapters of American capitalism, a truly epic and heroic story. I paid tribute to Hill in The Golden Pinnacle. I hope in some future novel I have the opportunity to skewer Buffet.

The sad part is that the reason given for not building the pipeline is "environmental concerns".
I think shipping oil by rail is much riskier so it really highlights the hypocrisy of the left.

A classic example of the power of pull.

Nice. The MSM is owned ~ they can't report real news...only lies & distortion.

I found that bit about Buffet very enlightening for an additional reason why the Keystone Pipeline is being blocked. I've been learning a lot since I started to hang out in the Gulch.

Actually, the largest amount of commercial goods transported from the U.S. interior is by barge, with rail second, and trucking third. Barge transport is safer, cheaper, more energy efficient and environmentally cleaner than any other method.

Nice find, lrbeggs.

Its all politics all the time

jim taggart over here!

Meaning the idea that airlines could disappear, and passenger rail travel could come roaring back, is still plausible.

good analysis of an obvious situation;;; as though
BHO was somehow a different kind of politician,
other than skin color. the use of skin color as a
shield for hyper-aggressive progressive fascism
is new, and next we have Hillary. same stuff. -- j

this is not new news. buffet is in cahoots with many who have vast sums of money here in the usa who work against the usa. I casn only imagine how successful we in the usa would be if people like buffet understood how much better they would be if they worked what I say is honestly in the free market system vs the system they work in now. as all goes to s___ they will ultimately lose all. buffet will probably not be alive when that happens unfortunately.

I sense a resentment here, but remember, billionaires, regardless of their crony affiliations are all billionaires, and Daddy Warbucks never really existed, excepting the illusory inking of 'Lil Orphan Annie'. Their self aggrandizement is a matter of record, and none of them has much in the way of redeeming value. Richard Branson and Charlie Koch are probably the best of a bad lot; I don't consider Gates because what good he's supposedly done has been done overseas, and I believe that Charity is best kept to home.

@Irbeggs, I wouldn't call 4.3 million stockholders a few, and it's closer to a billion if one considers the mutual funds and pension funds that hold stock as well. Yes, Buffet controls the corporation, which is much more than the railroad itself, but his 23 percent share is not total control and any number of large stake holders could by combination, take his control away.
The carriage of oil-sand crude from Canada and the Dakotas could be moved much more cheaply to the south, but not to the east or west, unless pipelines which are not proposed are proposed and built. How can we blame the railroad for taking advantage of the Democrat's intransience on Keystone? Buffet wasn't a controlling stake holder until after 2010, when all these environmental resistance began in 2008-9, and FYI, Union Pacific, Canadian National NA also serve Western Canada.

That makes even more sense, and why it has never seen the light of day in media.

Pipeline then Water then rail then truck are the most efficient methods of transporting goods ($ per pound mile).

They also go from the least to most flexible due to infrastructure required, and cost of implementation. There is a place for all of them (also air transport) depending on the value equation for the product and time requirements.

I find it sad that we have let the rail assets decay over the years enough that bulk/large goods don't seem to be able to share the rails with passenger transport easily. ... Once the economic conditions change (if ever), that too will be fixed. The politics will change to follow the economics in the long run.