Railroaders place to shoot the shit.

Billionaire Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., told employees of BNSF Dec. 21 that hes buying the railroad because of its position in the U.S. West, reports Bloomberg news.

I think the West is going to do well, Buffett told BNSF workers during an in-house interview with the railroads chief executive officer, Matt Rose. Id rather be in the West than the East.

The $26 billion purchase of Fort Worth, Texas-based BNSF is the biggest of Buffetts career, and what he called an all-in wager on the U.S. economy. The railroad stands to benefit from an increase in shipments of goods from the U.S.s Asian trading partners, including China.

I think I know how the country is going to develop, Buffett, 79, said in the interview, which was posted in a video on BNSFs intranet and distributed yesterday in a regulatory filing as a transcript.

Buffett divested Berkshires equity stakes in two competing railroads, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, as part of the BNSF transaction, he has said.

China ran up a record $266 billion trade surplus with the U.S. last year. China, the second-largest U.S. trading partner after Canada, may boost exports by 20 percent in the first quarter of 2010 as the global economy recovers, according to Macquarie Securities Ltd. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.

Berkshire has advanced 2.3 percent this year on the New York Stock Exchange and BNSF is up 30 percent. The companies said the merger may be completed in the first quarter.

Buffett, Berkshires CEO, is taking out $8 billion of debt to finance the purchase and risking Berkshires AAA credit rating, which Standard & Poors has said it may cut. He told the BNSF employees that he wont sell the railroads assets to pay debt and plans to continue investing in the companys infrastructure.

Itd be crazy if we didnt, Buffett said. Were not going to buy a business and starve it.

Buffett and a staff of about 20 people in Omaha oversee a collection of Berkshire operating companies that employ more than 200,000 and sell goods and services including energy, candy, clothing and luxury flights.

BNSF brings Berkshire another 40,000 workers, and Buffett said the takeover wont have an effect on employment.

Weve got 20 people in Omaha, and there isnt one of them that knows how to run a railroad, Buffett said. Youll be running the railroad, and youll run it in an efficient way, and when times are good, youre going to have more people employed than when times are bad.

(The preceding article was published by Bloomberg news.)