NS
NS’s Glake Yard team, which includes Christopher Cook, Hayden Kehl, Jeffrey Petersen, Todd Unger and Griffin Wall, recently achieved 15 years of injury-free service. Located in the Class I’s northwestern most part of the network, the “highly cohesive” railroaders celebrated the milestone in late June.
The Glake Yard, located in Des Moines, Iowa, is a “unique NS facility,” according to the Class I. The yard operates independently and is not connected to any of the railroad’s mainlines. It serves as an interchange to multiple Class I rails, supporting multiple customers. Outside carriers are responsible for performing their own switching. The self-directed team works in all-weather Midwestern conditions to “deliver safe, reliable, and resilient service to our customers without on-site supervision.”
“The Glake team is an incredible group of railroaders. They know each other very well and they look out for each other,” said NS Midwest Division Superintendent John Mosley. “They are model employees who safely achieve an optimal level of performance for our customers every day.”
BNSF
BNSF announced this week the completion of its multi-year, mainline improvement project in Becker, N.Mex. This new investment is adjacent to the railroad’s Belen facility, the largest fueling facility in North America, and will “improve the railroad’s total train capacity through the Southern Transcon route by roughly 30%,” according to the Class I.
“Belen, New Mexico is really the heartbeat of our Southern Transcon, accounting for about a quarter of BNSF’s entire fuel usage and 25% of our volume,” said BNSF VP of Service Design Jon Gabriel, who will take over as Group Vice President of Consumer Products in September. “Having this new added capacity in Becker positions us for tremendous growth, while improving service consistency for all our current customer traffic further reducing our carbon emissions across this key intermodal route.”
The Becker facility includes two new processing tracks at approximately 20,000 feet available for fueling, inspections and crew changes. These additions, BNSF says, “will minimize the time it takes for trains to stop and get moving again toward their destination.”
BNSF’s Belen, N.Mex., facility, located on the Clovis Subdivision, serves as the primary hub for BNSF fueling and inspections between Los Angeles and Chicago.
