I know that the passion for Wisconsin Central runs high on this forum. Who can resist rooting for the underdog? I’ve read some about Ed Burkhardt in relationship to WC, and railroads in Britain, New Zealand and Estonia. Recently, I stumbled onto a stash of old Trains Magazines. The Sept.1990 issue has an excellent story on the start up of WC. The Jan. 2001 has an article about “Ousted chief Ed Burkhardt tries to regain Wisconsin Central control”. He also said he thought WC should find a good merger partner-like CN. What the heck happened in the middle? Can anyone fill in some blanks for me? In fact, I wouldn’t mind learning more the man’s role in railroading before and after WC. Thanks
You missed a couple of more Ed Burkhardt ventures, like the MM&A, and Rail Polska.
Ed lost control of the Wisconsin Central when the big returns stopped coming in. I believe that he underestimated the difficulty of exporting American railroading to New Zealand and England. Tranz Rail
in New Zealand struggled and was eventually sold. EW&S went to CN when they bought WC, many people think that CN wants to sell EW&S but can’t get anywhere near the price that they want.
Estee Raundtee in Estonia is failing, Ed is getting squeezed by a Russian bear, and the European requirement for Open Access. Maybe he will have more luck with Rail Polska.
What caused things to change, when WC seemed to have such a promising start?
Well first off you have to understand where WC started from, a good railroad with a lot of potential and not a lot of traffic. So it was easy to grow traffic at first. Then they added a connection to the CN at Superior, bought up the Fox River Valley, the Green Bay and Western, the C&NW lines north of Green Bay, and the Algoma Central. Through all this the railroad was growing rapidly and making good money for its investors. But there wasn’t anymore opportunity to grow in the WC’s area so Ed looked at New Zealand where the government wanted to privatize the national railroad. So the WC bought the New Zealand railroad and called it Tranz Rail. Then Ed look at the UK and bought 4 of the 6 freight parts of the British Railway, later he added one more, the International part through the Channel Tunnel, calling the company English Welsh & Scottish Railway. But things were different in both New Zealand and the UK. There was resistance to his changes and things didn’t go the way he expected. For one thing he had passenger operations in New Zealand. In the UK competition was much tougher than he thought. In any case the profits to the investors most of whom were Wall Street types, were no longer enough to keep the stock price growing, indeed it started to slump. That is where the trouble came from, most of the problems came from NZ or the UK where profits were minimal. That is where the movement to dump Ed began.
It’s also been mentioned in “Trains” Magazine that possibly the “family” feel of WC started to fade, as Mr. Burkhardt expanded overseas, and the unions began to put pressure on WC for representation. That, several costly derailments(Weyaweaga, WI, for example), the battle over remote control(1 person crews), and the stock price dropping(at one time the stock had split 3-for-1), some believe, led to his ouster.
Shades of John W. Barriger, and Miss KATY!
So that’s the whole story? Ed Burkhardt comes out of nowhere, stats WC. It becomes a rising star. It starts to falter, and he is ousted?
Whuch is why they never made it into a movie
Except for the part “comes out of nowhere” you got it. Ed was VPO of C&NW for a time and did a good job there.
[(-D][(-D]
I know everyone likes WC (including myself) but they were one of the pioneers of 1 man crews and i have heard other stories of them screwing employees over…Gonna try to find them. I have heard from ex WC engineers that they were a fine company though.
Employee relations were fair to good for most of WC’s existence, but went down hill once Ed moved on to looking after the overseas operations and Reilly McCarren was brought in to run the day to day operations.
So what’s Ed up to these days?? Maybe the movie isn’t finished.
CC
Ed and his investors still own Estee Raudtee in Estonia, Rail Polska in Poland, and Maine, Montreal & Atlantic in North America. Estee Raudtee is in difficulty, and MM&A lost its largest customer right after startup but is hanging in there. As far as I know Rail Polska is doing relatively well, but OA in Europe is very competitive and it’s early days in Poland for OA so PKP Cargo the national railway doesn’t always play by the rules. Rail Polska only has a license to operate in Poland so far. None of Ed’s ventures since Wisconsin Central have been as successful.
No wonder I didn’t know what Ed was up to these days. The movie now has subtitles.
CC
Like it or not (and I don’t) this is the American Capitalistic Way folks!