Yesterday I was sitting at a railroad crossing while a train went by. It had several ADMX covered hoppers on it. I noticed some of them had a card in the card holder near the reporting marks. At the top of the card it had “Quality Guarantee” (if I remember correctly) and more information in smaller lettering that I could not read. The strange thing was that the cards had the Cargill logo on them.
Private owners don’t want their assets sitting idle. I would expect that Archer Daniels Midland leased out some of their fleet to Cargill during a slack period for ADM.
Cargill is a salt company [:)]
Cargill has much more products than just salt.
http://www.cargill.com/
Thanks, I that makes sense. I guess it just seems strange for a company to lease something to a competitor (even though railroads do it).
Eric, what kind of covered hoppers were they? ADM seems to have a bigger variety than Cargill, at least in its own fleet. This could be a prelude to Cargill buying or leasing more cars of its own.
ADM is in the process of getting a bunch (over 400) of new ethanol tank cars from Trinity Industries.
Carl:
ADM has another 600 ethanol cars to be built in 1Q08.
ed
Every once in a while, speculation arises that two railroads are going to merge because RR A is using a lot of engines from RR B. Therefore, Cargill lading in ADM cars can only mean one thing. Cargill and ADM are going to merge!
Jeff (tongue firmly planted in cheek)
Well, I sure hope they don’t forget their roots. They need to paint some of their cars in heritage paint schemes.[:o)]
They were in the ADMX 636000 series.
Hmmm–those are big cars, probably for dry distiller grain, a.k.a. Mookie’s yellow substance.
Cargill is the worlds largest private owned company and is more than just salt. Just to name a few ,they are involved in meat packing, grain trading, poultry, feed milling, flour milling, citrus production, oil seed processing and it goes on and on. I worked for Cargill Flour Milling in KS from 1981-1998. Today, several of these mills are now know as Horizon Milling which is still owned by Cargill. In Wichita, Cargill has several operations all within a 1/2 mile of each other: a twin unit flour mill (the largest in KS), a oilseed refinery, soybean crushing plant and a large terminal storage grain elevator that goes by the name Wichita Terminal Elevator Co. Also, Cargill operates a fleet of leased plain gray bulk flour hoppers w/reporting marks CFMX (Cargill Flr Milling).
And that is just scratching the surface. In August, Cargill released their numbers for their Fiscal Year ending May 31, 2007. Total revenues of $88.3 Billion.
A bit off topic, but with their 2005 acquisition of Georgia Pacific, Koch Industries of Kansas became the number 1 private company with estimated revenues of $108 Billion.
Are either of them (Cargill or Koch) part of the Military Industrial Complex yet?
Ike, you were so right!
I forgot all about Koch Industries and should have recalled that being they are based in Wichita.