Oil Boom | featured news

Energy companies behind the oil boom on the Northern Plains are increasingly turning to an industrial-age workhorse - the locomotive - to move their crude to refineries across the U.S., as plans for new pipelines stall and existing lines can't keep up with demand.

The austere North Dakota prairie is the unlikely center of one of the biggest oil booms in decades. But will drilling here and in other domestic oil patches help the country move closer to the elusive goal of energy independence?