LOS ANGELES (CN) — The Port of Long Beach is embarking on a massive overhaul of its cramped and aging rail yard to enable more cargo to get moved off the docks by train and to cut down on the number of diesel trucks that are currently hauling the vast majority of containers inland.
Last month, the U.S. Maritime Administration issued a final environmental impact statement and approved the Pier B On-Dock Rail Support Facility, a $1.5-billion a project that will take about 10 years to complete. The approval clears the way for the port to seek federal funding for the undertaking that aims to put 35% percent of the import containers arriving from across the Pacific on trains.
The new yard is the centerpiece of four rail projects at the port to move cargo faster, more efficiently and more sustainably as the unprecedented increase of imports from Asia shows no sign of slowing down. Both the Port of Long Beach and the adjacent Port of Los Angeles, which together form the largest container port complex in the U.S., are trying to reduce their carbon footprint while at the same time coping with capacity constraints to handle the millions of arriving containers each year driven by unrelenting consumer demand.
"We will grow, and we will grow green," Mario Cordero, the executive director of the port, said at an April 28 ceremony for the completion of the first of the four rail projects, a double track that will allow four marine terminals to handle both arriving and departing trains simultaneously. "We want to eliminate trucks from the freeways and the neighborhoods."
The key issue the expanded rail yard will address is that there isn't enough space at the port currently to assemble thousands of loaded rail cars into enough single trains that can go straight from the port to major consumer markets in the interior U.S., such as Chicago, Dallas, or Denver. As a result, the bulk of the containers headed to those destinations are now hauled by truck to rail yards near downtown LA, about 17 miles outside the port, where they are put on trains, which is of course a lot more polluting and less efficient.
In addition, the existing rail yard doesn't have enough room to accommodate 10,000-foot-long trains, which are becoming the railroad industry's norm for container trains, so that arriving trains that length need to be broken up into smaller segments outside the port. This leads to more delays at street crossings in the vicinity and, again, more pollution and less efficiency.
"Rail is such an important part of that movement toward a greener, more sustainable community," Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said at the April 28 event. "We know that just one full train removes up to 2,000 trucks that come in and out of our port."
The new yard will add five 2-mile long arrival and departure tracks to accommodate these long trains. By comparison, the longest track in the Pier B yard currently is just 2,000 feet. The expansion will also more than quadruple the space at the support yard, from 20,000 to 93,000 feet of rail, to store and sort rail cars before they either go to a marine terminal to get loaded or get added to a departing train. The project also adds a resupply station for up to 30 locomotives.
As a result, more containers can be put directly on cars at the port's five marine terminals equipped with rails, where the containers are unloaded from the ships, and moved to the yard, where they can be assembled into trains by destination, thereby more than doubling the number of daily trains that are ready to depart the port for the Midwest and the Southern U.S.
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