Sep 22: Chicago, IL, to Manitowoc, WI

A quick 180-mile, 3½-hr cruise up I-94, but before that, lunch with someone I've wanted to meet for a long time.

A most interesting couple of hours and lunch with a vital elder of America's railroad industry. In 1993, New Zealand Rail Ltd, was privatised by the Bolger National Government, sold—after a tendering process—to the Fay Richwhite-Wisconsin Central International consortium, and shortly afterwards renamed Tranz Rail Limited, with Ed Burkhardt as chairman. Ed at the time was the chairman, CEO and president of Wisconsin Central Transportation Co. (WC) and became very familiar with Tranz Rail through regular bi-monthly visits to New Zealand, each time staying for a fortnight.

In 1997, Burkhardt, was appointed by the New Zealand government as its honorary consul to Chicago and in 1999, premier North American rail industry journal Railway Age named him as its “Railroader of the Year”. During this period, WC was short of locomotive staff and Ed, with a new-age view of locomotive crewing requirements, was not popular with the U.S. craft unions, which urged locomotive crew not to sign on with WC. At the same time, Tranz Rail was experiencing over-staffing in its engine service workforce, so Ed wondered if some New Zealand locomotive staff might be amenable to the idea of moving permanently to the U.S. to work for WC. When he advertised his idea, he was surprised by the positive response from Kiwi locomotive engineers and very quickly selected and organised Green Cards for a cadre of Kiwi employees to relocate to Wisconsin.

Ed was soon impressed with the New Zealander’s ability to assimilate both professionally and socially with their American workmates and overall, the experiment has proven very successful. Although a few have returned to New Zealand, as could well have been expected, this group by and large has settled in the United States and are even now retiring and remaining there.

The initiative by Burkhardt to enter into this arrangement is undoubtedly a world first and only. The only other instance of a mass migration of locomotive staff from one country to another that I can think of must be the recruitment during the 1970s and 80s of locomotive engine service personnel (of which I was one) from New Zealand and other countries such as Great Britain, Rhodesia, and even Roumania, to the iron ore railroads in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia.

Although much beset over recent years by various industry challenges (I could say that owning a railroad is not the same as owning a shop... you can be very exposed at times), Ed remains upbeat and is still very much in charge of Rail World Inc, the company he founded in 1999 following his tenure at WC, and is kept busy with the company's ownership of Rail Polska, which has an unrestricted operator license on the Polish rail network.Les mer