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Since late 2010, BNSF Railway Co. has dealt with infrastructure challenges posed by severe weather, including record snowfalls in the north to floods throughout the nation’s midsection caused by all-time-high spring runoffs from the Missouri and Souris rivers. And it likely will be early fall before the Class I fully recovers from the “unprecedented” bouts with Mother Nature, said BNSF Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer John Lanigan in an Aug. 11 letter to customers that’s posted on the Class I’s website.

“BNSF has experienced natural disasters that have affected our facilities, track, equipment and people. In the most significant incident, one of our busiest corridors along the Missouri River, the St. Joseph Subdivision, was completely severed by the widespread flooding,” he wrote.

In response to the weather challenges, BNSF employees and contractors “have worked around the clock” to restore service, Lanigan said.

“We have rerouted as many as 40 percent of our trains and temporarily relocated up to nearly 500 train crew employees to handle rerouted traffic,” he wrote. “We have undertaken extensive preventive and rebuilding efforts, including raising miles of track by amounts of up to eight feet, building levees and berms to protect the rail, and repairing and replacing hundreds of miles of damaged track, bridges and structures.”

But despite all the efforts, the railroad still is rerouting about 20 percent of all shipments, said Lanigan. BNSF officials expect to reopen the St. Joseph Subdivision in September and get traffic on all routes back to normal by October, he wrote.

The Class I — which plans to spend more than $300 million this year to “restore and harden” its network — also is completing some infrastructure work along with flood repairs, said Lanigan. For example, in the St. Joseph Subdivision, crews are expanding a network of bridges while the area still is flooded and the bridge work should be completed by Sept. 8, he wrote.