An interesting article appears in Today's Wall Street Journal. While short on specifics, the article implies that the UP and BNSF are in a Cecil B DeMille "neck and neck" race to double track their lines.
The Journal's site is by subscription, but possibly those at work today can get lucky with the boss's computer. Here's the link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1104 ... 5Fone%5Fus
For the rest, it's either at your newsstand for a buck, or review this "brief passage":
The Journal's site is by subscription, but possibly those at work today can get lucky with the boss's computer. Here's the link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1104 ... 5Fone%5Fus
For the rest, it's either at your newsstand for a buck, or review this "brief passage":
- TANGIER, Okla. -- More than 135 years after the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, R. J. Juarez is trying to do it again. On a hot day in late summer, at this dusty outpost near the Texas-Oklahoma border, Mr. Juarez urged the mammoth machine he was operating to move faster.
The yellow beast, more than a quarter of a mile long, should have been capable of laying a mile of railroad in less than five hours but it had been "touchy all day," said Mr. Juarez, a track worker. He had to restart it repeatedly. "We should have been done earlier," he grumbled.
Mr. Juarez is a player in a modern version of the track-laying race that created the U.S.'s cross-country rail link. Today's competition is between two industry giants, Union Pacific Corp., the nation's largest railroad, and Mr. Juarez's employer, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. Both want to be the first to run side-by-side tracks between Chicago and Los Angeles, the nation's busiest freight entry point.
