Bob Turner - Western Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials - July 13, 2005

Bob Turner, senior vice president-Corporate Relations, presented the following speech at the Western Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials's annual meeting held in Omaha, Nebraska.

I'd like to tell a few stories about our company, our people, and some of the great challenges that we've faced and overcome as we've played a major role in the development of the west.  Since the 1860s, Union Pacific has played a pivotal role in the opening and then the settling of the west.  And today, we continue to play a critical role in keeping the economy moving and our nation prospering. It's quite a story.

While it is a slight exaggeration to say that the history of Union Pacific is the history of the West, it is no exaggeration to say that the two histories are inextricably linked. 

The first person who had a key role in our company was Abraham Lincoln.   He created Union Pacific on July 1, 1862, by signing into law the Pacific Railroad Act. Basically, the act granted government land and a loan financed with government bonds for a new corporation that was called the Union Pacific Railroad Company.  Very few companies have the signature of a President of the United States on the documents that created the company, but we are one.

Ground was broken here in Omaha in 1863, but actual construction was delayed for another 18 months. The delay was caused by a familiar foe. It had nothing to do with environmental impact statements, noise mitigation issues, or a stalled federal highway bill. There simply wasn't enough money.

The first rail was finally laid in July of 1865, actually a couple of hundred yards from this spot where we are today. Thomas C. Durant, the railroad's vice president and another key person in our history, was the main visionary and financial genius of Union Pacific.

Here he is looking West – to infinity – across the Nebraska plains and judging by the look of those railroad ties, probably asking himself: WHAT have I gotten myself into?

Durant hired Grenville Dodge to quarterback actual construction. Dodge was a Union general in the just-concluded Civil War and a world-class engineer. He had the incredible organizational and technical skills to get the job done.

He was also a great leader of men, and since many of those who worked on building the railroad were returning veterans of the Civil War, he was a great choice.

The big picture was this: Our track gangs moved West from Omaha and Central Pacific's gangs moved East from Sacramento, California.

On the UP side of the project, we built 1,086 miles of railroad across prairies, deserts, 8,000-foot high mountains and rivers – some of the most difficult terrain on earth.

Imagine that along the entire route there was not one single settlement of any size. There also weren't any bulldozers, rock drills, modern explosives – or on the human level, modern medical facilities.

There was only mile after mile of barren land.

We began with a work force out of Omaha that numbered between 200 and 300 men, many of them, as I said, Civil War Veterans. By the time we reached Promontory Summit, we had 10,000 employees and Central Pacific had the same number.

Pay scales ranged from $1 a day for pick and shovel workers to a whopping $4.17 a day for foremen. They worked seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day. They laid one to three miles of track a day, IF they could push through the below-zero temperatures of winter and the 100-degree days of summer. And they weren't attacked by Indians or bitten by snakes, and they got enough to eat and drink and they didn't get sick.

It took a huge human toll.  Many employees died while building the railroad, although no one knows for sure how many.

Perhaps the most impressive part of what employees accomplished related to logistics. There was absolutely nothing at the work site that could be used to build a railroad or support the men. Everything – rails, ties, bridging, every bit of food and supplies for the workers – everything was brought up the Missouri River and then moved to the work site by train. So for every mile of progress you had one mile of supply line.

Grenville Dodge wrote that he needed 40 railroad cars of materials and supplies to build one mile of track.  

I should point out that the Central Pacific had it worse. Most of the iron and all heavy equipment, like locomotives, rails, cars, and wheels, had to be made in the East and shipped around Cape Horn to California – which took five to six months.

Pushing West through Wyoming was exhausting and treacherous. A 650-foot bridge spanning Dale Creek had to be constructed. This was the longest trestle on the line. It rose 150 feet from the bottom of the Canyon. It swayed in the wind. Those at the scene said it was terrifying to cross.

For the Central Pacific crews, winter weather was the big foe. During the winter of 1866, it took almost 5,000 men just to keep the track shoveled in the Sierra Nevada. They had to contend with frostbite, pneumonia, avalanches, and no shelter.

One more comment about mountains. Building tunnels was no fun. Holes had to be drilled into solid granite. It took three eight-hour shifts to make 12 inches of progress, even with dynamite.  Tunneling was by far the most dangerous work on the railroad.

EVERY day was a physical challenge. But eventually both railroads reached the big prize – the Salt Lake Valley. The completion of the transcontinental railroad captured the entire nation's attention. Western Union offered coverage direct from the scene – the first major news event carried "live" from coast-to-coast.

The ceremony spotlighted Union Pacific's train, No. 119, meeting Central Pacific's train, called the Jupiter. Legend has it that the representative of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford, tried to drive his golden spike – but missed completely. Nevertheless the telegraph operator, who could not actually SEE what was going on, sent out the word "done" to the waiting nation. Whistles were blown in San Francisco, the Liberty Bell was rung in Philadelphia, and a ball was held in Washington, D.C.

Forty-six months after they started, the two railroads had come together and officially put the "united" in the United States of America. The unification of the country was complete. The railroad had opened the heart of the continent, changing it forever.

The cost to build the UP portion of the new railroad was somewhere between $50 and $60 million. In today's dollars, including labor, it would cost billions.

But the transcontinental railroad was worth every dime. Travel from New York to San Francisco went from six months to 10 days. More importantly, the railroad link meant new settlements for millions of Americans, new trade with overseas partners, and an incredible surge in industrial growth.

Even if NOTHING else followed, the building of this railroad was a tremendous tribute to the work ethic, skill and innovation of Union Pacific employees. It was also the beginning of a transportation revolution that continues to this day.

So after building the railroad what challenge came next?

Well if you think about it, what they had just built was the first leg of what has become a 33,000-mile factory. Without a roof.  So weather and natural disasters came next and of course we will be facing that one forever. We spend a lot of time and money tracking snowstorms, tornadoes and floods.

But you can't plan for the largest, most devastating earthquake in American history and that is what happened in San Francisco in 1906. The earthquake destroyed 200,000 homes in San Francisco, so you can imagine the chaos.

Edward H. Harriman was chairman of the Union Pacific. He was in his New York City office when the earthquake struck 3,000 miles away. He immediately directed the railroad to do everything it could to help and then jumped on a train for San Francisco to personally direct his employees.

Helping out meant transporting food, medicine and people. Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroad collected supplies in the larger towns along the two systems and rushed them to the Bay Area. In the 35 days following the disaster, more than 1,600 carloads of relief supplies were moved in on the railroad, and about a quarter million residents of San Francisco were moved out.

Our next major weather challenge was the blizzard of 1949. For seven consecutive weeks in January and February, our service was interrupted by one storm after another.

Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho were hit with heavy snows, winds blowing up to 80 miles per hour, and temperatures falling to 51 degrees below zero. Never before in our history had the railroad faced conditions where the best efforts of our employees and our machinery were met day after day with failure.

During those long seven weeks, the only traffic that moved was food, fuel, feed for livestock and snowfighting equipment for communities on our line that were completely cut off.  There was no interstate highway system in 1949.

14,000 employees worked to clear the tracks using rotary plows, wedge and spreader plows, bulldozers and even flame-throwers to try to keep the tracks cleared and the trains moving.

Floods can be an even bigger threat. In 1993, some of you may remember that the United States was, in essence, cut in half by severe flooding of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

It was the worst flooding in our history and presented challenges that our employees had never faced before. System wide, almost 1,700 miles of our railroad were damaged or completely underwater and out of service.

Some points in the river went from 150 yards wide to four miles wide, bank to bank. Our tracks were under 20 feet of mud and water. Near St. Louis, the waters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers converged, funneling one million cubic feet of water per second toward our tracks - 10 times the normal flow.

And a more recent example of how flooding impacts us was just this past January when a massive storm hit California and Nevada. It damaged our rail system and temporarily shut down 5 out of 6 routes in and out of Los Angeles. Two of those routes required massive reconstruction. One was the line that follows the coastline from Los Angeles to Oakland. Another was between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City – an 80-mile stretch of the railroad that runs through the Caliente canyon there. It was essentially decimated, inaccessible by state and local roads.

Before we could rebuild the railroad we had to rechannel water into normal flows. Then we rebuilt access roads, then we rebuilt the track. Meanwhile our Harriman Dispatching Center here in Omaha, rerouted trains carrying shipments that were vital to public health and safety. It was a team effort, employees worked day and night to return us to service, and they did it without a single employee injury. 

By now you are probably getting a sense of why we are so proud of our employees and why our employees are so proud of what they do – tunneling through mountains, using flamethrowers to open up a snow-packed track, rechanneling water out of canyons ... this is not your average desk job. In fact many of our employees have so much pride they will tell you, look we don't work FOR the railroad, we ARE the railroad. 

We are not only proud of what our employees do for the Union Pacific but we are also proud of the role they have and continue to play in supporting our country. During World War II, we played a major role in moving troops and supplies throughout the country.

But what the public is most likely to recall are our canteens, like the most famous one in North Platte, Nebraska. This little town in the middle of Nebraska hosted up to 10,000 servicemen and women a day between 1942 and 1945.  They met every train with sandwiches and friendship for our troops headed for war in the Pacific. 

In the last half of the 20th century the major event was passage of a federal law that encouraged railroads to merge. That paved the way for a series of mergers that make up today's Union Pacific.

We merged with six major railroads over time – the Missouri Pacific, the Western Pacific, the Chicago and North Western, the KATY, Southern Pacific and the Denver and Rio Grande. The result of all that is we have a service territory that extends from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean and from the upper Midwest down to the Gulf of Mexico. 

We also gained access to the coal fields of Wyoming, and today, coal is in second place in terms of what we move the most of. Industrial products such as lumber, cement and paper are first, and then our other major business groups are intermodal, chemicals, agriculture and automotive. Much of the aggregate and rock used in highway construction moves on our railroad, as well.  Since I have a highway audience here I'll throw in some free automotive trivia: 80 percent of the finished vehicles sold west of the Mississippi are delivered by Union Pacific.

Well that about brings us up to today. Union Pacific has many things in common with the WASHTO membership. One of them is geography. We operate in the western two-thirds of the United States – the same area that makes up your membership. So as you already know, the tremendous growth in the western and southwestern U.S. is a major challenge for all of us in the transportation industry.  

In addition to the population growth in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and the entire southwest demand for consumer goods from Asia and Mexico is very strong. Gross Domestic Product and Industrial Production, two key measures of economic strength, are predicted to show strong growth through the end of the decade. The effect of all that is a huge demand for shipping. In fact in aggregate, this is the first time transportation demand is approaching – and in some cases exceeding – supply.

What ever the solutions to the demand in transportation turn out to be, the organizations represented in this room today will be the key players in their development and their implementation.

Transportation, as you know, is key to the economic strength of this nation.

Some people say that over the years Union Pacific built a railroad. We say we're more than that. We are part of the backbone of this nation. In many cases we have several generations of the SAME FAMILY working for Union Pacific. The work our employees have been doing every day for the last 143 years affects the lives of nearly everyone in this country. It's not an accident our shield resembles an American flag. A company that came to be through the hand of Abraham Lincoln can be nothing less than absolutely committed to America's success. We know you are committed to her success as well. We are working with many of you in this room on the transportation issues we both face and we look forward to continuing that partnership with you into the 21st century.