2000 merger between BNSF & CN to form NA Railway?

[melmerby]

Hi all

I have a railway dictionary which has the entry for BNSF appended with "Merged with CN in 2000 to form North American Railway".

What's that all about? Sounds like total fiction. Was it even planned?

Wikipedia doesn't even have an entry for a "North American Railway"

 

AFAIK it never happened as CN's biggest stockholder is currently Bill Gates with no mention of BNSF or Berkshire Hathaway.

 

N.B. the book is dated as a 2006 revision.

[Nova Scotian]

Planned merger was announced in 1999. Called off 2000 - 2001, there was a moratorium for 15 months on any class 1 mergers, followed by a ruling that only Kansas City Southern could be merged as a class 1 (setting the scene for this year!).

 

Lots available online, you just need to tweak your searching, use the full name for legal documents "Burlington Northern Santa Fe" and "Canadian National". You'll find stuff from SEC, but also various newspaper articles like wall street journal where they've kept their back catalogue online.

 

I caught it in a document/brochure in 2016 that must have just made its way through new versions since 1999/2000 without amendment, so a 2006 book doesn't sound too bad!

[pH]

Actually, you don’t need to be very legal in your search terms. A search of “BNSF CN merger” will get you plenty of information.

[Nova Scotian]

I also bet @mdvle would be a fount of knowledge on this question

[mdvle]

No fountain of knowledge, though I vaguely recalled it - though that may have been the result of the news articles about the CN/CP/KCS battle.

 

In many cases the secret of my apparent knowledge is simply the ability, through lots of practice, to use Google - which has been already noted above.

 

Sometimes another good source can be Wikipedia - while they don't have an entry for the proposed holding company they do have what appears to be a reasonable summary in their BNSF entry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNSF_Railway#Attempted_merger_with_CN

 

(the key with Wikipedia is not just to treat it with suspicion at times, but to use the references that it provides in its footnotes to look into things further).

[melmerby]

5 hours ago, mdvle said:

 

(the key with Wikipedia is not just to treat it with suspicion at times, but to use the references that it provides in its footnotes to look into things further).

How true

I often follow through to other sources of info.