Headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, the railroad's parent company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., of Omaha, Nebraska.

[7] Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway acquired BNSF Railway in February 2010, obtaining all of its shares and taking the company private.

BNSF and its chief competitor, the Union Pacific Railroad, have a duopoly on all transcontinental freight rail lines in the Western, Midwestern and Southern United States[8] and share trackage rights over thousands of miles of track.

It built one of the first transcontinental railroads in North America, linking Chicago and Southern California; major branches led to Texas, Denver, and San Francisco.

Its main lines included Chicago-Seattle with branches to Texas (ex-Burlington) and Birmingham, Alabama (ex-Frisco), and access to the low-sulfur coal of Wyoming's Powder River Basin.

The Illinois Central Railroad and Kansas City Southern Railway (KCS), two of the five "small" Class Is, announced on July 19 that the former would buy the latter,[12] but this plan was called off on October 25.

The Union Pacific Railroad (UP), another major Western system, started a bidding war with BN for control of the SF on October 5.

KCS gained haulage rights to several Midwest locations, including Omaha, East St. Louis, and Memphis, in exchange for BNSF getting similar access to New Orleans.

Unlike BN and ATSF, UP and SP had significant overlap, where the end of competition between the two risked creating a monopoly for freight carriage in much of the West.

Significant additions included rights over SP's Central Corridor from Denver via the Moffat Tunnel and Salt Lake City, and over Donner Pass, to the San Francisco Bay Area, with an alternate route through the Feather River Canyon along UP.

[25][26] The Surface Transportation Board, successor to the ICC, approved the UP-SP merger on July 3,[27] and UP control of SP took effect on September 11, 1996.

[30] The ex-ATSF main line, now known as the Southern Transcon, has also seen steady work to add tracks, giving BNSF more capacity on this major intermodal route.

With CN's lines primarily in Canada and, through subsidiary Illinois Central Railroad, on a north–south corridor near BNSF's eastern edge, the two systems had little overlap.

Shippers and the Surface Transportation Board expressed concern and surprise about the timing, since the merger that produced BNSF had been the only one in the 1990s that did not cause severe deterioration in service.

[36] The STB released its final rules on June 11, 2001,[37] requiring any new application to merge two Class I railroads, with the exception of smaller Kansas City Southern Railway, to demonstrate that competition would be preserved and address effects of defensive moves by other carriers.

[44] The deal was structured so that the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation would merge with and into R Acquisition Company, LLC, an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.

Most commonly, grain may move west on the Northern Transcon to the Pacific Northwest and its export terminals, or south to ports in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.

The latter begins its trip on the triple-track Alameda Corridor, shared with the Union Pacific Railroad, and then follows BNSF rails from downtown Los Angeles.

[58] BNSF Railway directly owns and operates track in 28 U.S. states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

BNSF locomotives also occasionally show up on competitors' tracks throughout the United States and Canada by way of leases, mileage equalizations, and other contractual arrangements.

The system mechanical division also operates the Western Fruit Express Company's refrigerated car repair shop in Spokane, Washington.

[citation needed] The company's network also hosts other commuter trains, including Metrolink in Southern California and the Northstar Line in Minneapolis.

BNSF contracts with News Link, a small business in Lincoln, Nebraska, to publish employee newsletters focused on safety for some of the railroad's divisions and shops.

[74] In August 2016, a "huge number" of used hypodermic drug needles were found along a BNSF railroad bridge between the University Park and St. Johns neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon, that had become an encampment for the unhoused.

The unions maintain that these cuts will make it difficult for BNSF to finish needed repairs and inspections of its rolling stock.

Most of BNSF's high-horsepower road locomotives are painted in "Heritage" schemes – primarily based on BN predecessor Great Northern Railway's colors of Omaha Orange and Pullman Green, with yellow striping and silver underframes.

VMV Enterprises in Paducah, Kentucky painted it in a one-of-a-kind commemorative scheme, combining Santa Fe's "Warbonnet" with BN's "Executive" colors of dark "Grinstein green" and cream.

Some of the striping details were different on each side,[82] and employees voted for the simpler right-side design, which, with some minor changes, became the new scheme,[83] replacing the BN colors.

[94] In 2023, two wildlife protection organizations, WildEarth Guardians and the Western Watershed Project, brought legal action against BNSF for ignoring the Endangered Species Act and not attempting to diminish the number of grizzly bears allegedly killed by trains in Montana since 2008.

BNSF has applied to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service for a permit that would eliminate any penalty to the railroad for killing bears.