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people on the scene. The story they jointly told was quiteinteresting, particularly in light of what we know now. Whilethe accident was blamed on one of the engineers running pasta siding, the actual facts suggest that the real cause wasprobably crew fatigue.Friday evening we returned to hear our Convention SpeakerRollin Bredenberg, BNSF VP of Service Design & Performance.Rollin had been scheduled to be our speaker in FortWorth, but missed the meeting and promised to go anywherewe met in the future to make up for oversleeping on thatoccasion. His trip to Mandan (unfortunately not by privaterailcar) was well worth it for our group as he had a numberof interesting insights. One of the really amazing themes hepresented was the amount of growth in the carload trafficsector of the railroad. While Coal and Intermodal get thepublicity, the carload traffic has been growing steadily overthe last decade and provides a substantial part of the BNSF’srevenue. The challenge he presented was how to move itefficiently and productively. He presented where the railroad’sgrowth is coming from and what the plans are to increasecapacity to move the growing traffic. This includes the notedprojects of finishing double tracking the Transcon, as well asproviding 3 rd and even 4 th tracks in Wyoming. He alsomentioned the ongoing projects to improve intermodal endpoints(logistic parks), as well as the facilities being built toexpedite carload traffic. He answered many questions,commenting on the railroad’s corporate image (he felt theefforts to develop Heritage I and II schemes may have beengiven more effort that they were worth), the bypass linethrough eastern Colorado that had been mentioned at lastyear’s convention (the railroad is all for it if public monies areforthcoming – he felt the real impetus for the plan was thepublic desire to get the rail tracks out of Denver), andcommented on a number of questions about individual projectsthat the railroad either was or was not going to undertake. Hiscomments as usual for our Convention Speakers were excellent.We finished our evening with another auction andadjourned until Saturday AM.Saturday AM started with Cordell taking us to MandanYard to view activities there and get a sense of what was goingto be moving Saturday. By then the derailment to the west hadbeen cleared up (the Steel Gang had been called into the effortand returned to the hotel Friday morning looking prettyexhausted) and there were many trains out there. With acombination of Cordell’s knowledge and a number of scannerswe learned of the operating challenges of the area. There wasone loaded eastbound coal train stranded on the main west oftown without a crew, followed by 2 other loads whose crewswere almost out of time and several empties filling sidings.With all these trains out there we were able to get to severalgood photo locations and get some great shots. We also wereable to get a sense of the problems the dispatchers had andhow, for better or worse, they solved the problems. Most ofus were able to be “Monday morning quarterbacks” and figurehow we could have done things better without calling 3 crewswhose workdays were 28 miles. But it did give us a greatchance to see and photograph the railroad at work.Then it was time to head for home and prepare fornext year’s convention in Lincoln, Nebraska!Page 12BN Expediter