I'm unconcerned with the political aspects of things, but I'm just not in 

 that work at the present time. We have some areas of agreement I think, 

 and one thing I'd like to assure Fred is when he says coal is here to stay 

 in the West, I think that any of us who read the reports of that last few 

 days are pretty well convinced that this is true. We were convinced 

 many, many years ago that coal is one of the great national assets, one of 

 the great North American assets and one of the great assets of the entire 

 free world. I see no reason why we won't see a much greater use made of 

 this coal in the next few years and I also see no reason why this coal 

 can't be put to use in a very fine, compatible way with the environment 

 and the area. And I think that a lot of this is being done now. 



I think all of us know that during these last few years coal has 

 proliferated tremendously over this entire area which is known normally as 

 the Powder River Basin and extends into both Montana and Wyoming. I 

 personally think that the development of this has been quite orderly 

 although a lot of people, I am sure, would disagree with me and say that 

 it has come too fast. But when you say it's come too fast I think you 

 have to take into consideration the fact that this coal development did come 

 about as a result of environmental protections in many of the areas of the 

 United State and the fact also that this development resulted directly from 

 a demand by people just like all of us who are sitting here in this room 

 today. It was in order to meet that demand that the coal production 

 began in that area. But, also Burlington Northern and other railroads 

 reacted to that by providing the necessary transportation. We are the 

 principal coal hauler in the United States however. And I think the thing 

 that's important here is that in 1968 there were probably only two or three 

 major hauls of coal that we were making. We were hauling around a couple 

 million tons or something like that. I don't remember the exact amount but 

 it was very small. Now, this last year our company moved over 80 million 

 tons of coal. And this capacity and change in movement came about 

 largely because we had foreseen what was going to take place and we had 

 done a lot of core drilling. We had done a lot of preparation for this and 

 I should add at this time that we were not unmindful of other means of 

 moving this coal. 



About 1971, shortly after Burlington Northern was formed by merger, 

 Burlington Northern and Bechtel--who was the principal component of the 

 Energy Transportation Systems, Inc. which Fred represents--and Peabody 

 Coal Company (the largest coal company in the United States) went into a 

 temporary consortium to make a thorough study of the slurry possibilities 

 because we did want to look at everything before we proceeded completely 

 on the route of transportation of coal by other means. At that time we 

 did conduct this study to the best of the ability of the three companies 

 and I think it was a thorough study. I'm sure it was. And within about 

 a year in 1972, the consortium was disolved. 



Burlington Northern concluded, without any question, that in all 

 aspects--economic, environmental and other aspects--the unit coal train 

 was superior to the slurry pipeline. We have not changed our posture 

 since that time and I can see no reason, at least in the reasonable future, 



