Union Tank Car Company or UTLX is a railway equipment leasing, rail car maintenance, and rail car manufacturing company headquartered in metro

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

. A direct descendant of

Standard Oil Standard Oil Company, Inc., was an American oil production, transportation, refining, and marketing company that operated from 1870 to 1911. At its height, Standard Oil was the largest petroleum company in the world, and its success made its co-f ...

, the firm today is owned by

Berkshire Hathaway Berkshire Hathaway Inc. () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. Its main business and source of capital is insurance, from ...

. Union Tank Car Company was founded in 1866 by Captain Jacob J. Vandergrift, in response to the economic activities of

John D. Rockefeller John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (July 8, 1839 – May 23, 1937) was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He has been widely considered the wealthiest American of all time and the richest person in modern history. Rockefeller was ...

in the years leading up to his creation of Standard Oil. Vandergrift was involved in the conflicts in the oil regions of Western Pennsylvania in the 1860s–1870s. Eventually, Union Tank Car Company and Vandergrift's other holdings, which included pipeline and riverboat transport companies, merged with the company that later became Standard Oil. Rockefeller, once Captain Vandergrift's nemesis, made him Vice President of Standard Oil. The town of

Vandergrift, Pennsylvania Vandergrift is a borough in Westmoreland County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, approximately northeast of Pittsburgh. Early in the 20th century, it had the largest sheet steel mill in the world. On June 28, 1915, the Borough of Vandergrift ...

, built in 1895 by steel company president George G. McMurtry to house his workers, was named in Vandergrift's honor.

TransUnion TransUnion is an American consumer credit reporting agency. TransUnion collects and aggregates information on over one billion individual consumers in over thirty countries including "200 million files profiling nearly every credit-active consum ...

was formed as a holding company in 1968 to hold Union Tank Car Company. TransUnion soon began acquiring credit information and information management companies as a second major investment. The

Marmon Group Marmon Group is an American industrial holding company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois; founded by Jay Pritzker and Robert Pritzker in 1953 (as Colson Corporation), it has been held by the Berkshire Hathaway group since 2013. It owns compani ...

acquired TransUnion in 1981, spinning off the TransUnion name and the financial portion of the holding company to

Madison Dearborn Partners Madison Dearborn Partners (MDP) is an American private equity firm specializing in leveraged buyouts of privately held or publicly traded companies, or divisions of larger companies; recapitalizations of family-owned or closely held companies; ba ...

in the 1990s. Union Tank Car Company is still owned by Marmon, which in turn is now a 100% owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.

References

External links

UTLX
corporate site

Chicago History thumbnail

Victorian Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society site

Alle-Kiski Today (Western Pennsylvania regional magazine) {{Berkshire Hathaway Companies based in Chicago Rolling stock leasing companies

See also

References

External links