Tours of BNSF Headquarters?

Are tours given to the public of this operation center? I know they have a gift shop and small museum but what about a tour of the big operations room from the viewing bridge in the building? Or are tours only given to convention groups?

No tours are given at NOC.

I ended up visiting the headquarters. There were no tours. But the small museum in the lobby is interesting and I did purchase souveniers from the gift shop. Beautiful grounds and buildings. When was it built?

I have visit of BNSF. I was lucky enough to score the TTX cars, BNSF GP-38's, and full Santa Fe sets before they ever were discontinued. I also started buying motors, controllers, and track in anticipation of someday displaying our layout publicly.In 2008, we decided it was time to introduce the public to our layout. We started with the La Crosse Model Train Show as a warm-up for Brickworld 2008.

Best regards,

I was there on business in the year 2000 and I saw the operations center from a conference room that overlooks it.

Our contacts at BNSF joked that they knew that they couldn't possibly have the meeting with us in that conference room because there was no way I would pay attention . What could I say, they were right!

Other than the operations center and the downstairs gift shop, it's really just your basic office building. There is a lot of railroad artwork on the walls, though. At the time they had a full color handout (about the size of a small magazine) that described all of the pieces that were installed in the building.

We got a walkthrough of some of the private cars that were in front of the building. They were being used as conference rooms at the time.

I thought our BNSF hosts were quite gracious. They appreciated that we knew something about their business as well (pause for self-pat on back).