A contentious cargo plan

If it were a hub for ships instead of trains, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.’s Hobart rail yard would rank as the fourth-largest U.S. container port, behind Los Angeles, Long Beach and New York-New Jersey.

The Hobart yard sits southeast of downtown Los Angeles on 245 acres of continuous movement. It’s the busiest rail yard in the country for transferring cargo containers between trucks and trains.

Within Hobart’s boundaries, rail cars double stacked with cargo containers are guided, with the help of global positioning technology, to one of seven trains being assembled into 7,000-foot caravans. Teams of locomotives haul the freight across the nation’s second-largest rail system, carrying a wealth of imported toys, clothes and the like to such destinations as Houston, Chicago and Memphis, Tenn.

But the Hobart rail yard is about to hit a wall. Late this year, Fort Worth-based Burlington Northern’s BNSF Railway Co. expects Hobart to reach its capacity of 1.5 million 40-foot cargo containers, like a parking lot filling up and having to turn cars away.

“We’re done. We have run out of room. We just can’t expand here anymore,” said Chuck Potempa, BNSF’s terminal superintendent for Los Angeles.

Facing the prospect of a significant slowdown in moving goods east, BNSF came up with a plan: Build another rail yard, partly inside the Port of Los Angeles. The proposed yard would double BNSF’s ability to assemble intercontinental trains.

The yard would straddle parts of Los Angeles, Carson and west Long Beach, and many of its prospective neighbors don’t like the plan, which has intensified worries among community activists, environmentalists and some politicians about pollution from the ports and the trains and trucks that serve them.

The facility would be built across the street from Long Beach’s Hudson Elementary School. Studies have shown that children in Long Beach and other industrial areas suffer from decreased lung development.

In a Long Beach coffee shop Wednesday, a dozen residents discussed their concerns about air quality.

“I just don’t know if I can send my daughter there next year if this is going to be built,” said Elsie Ortega, mother of a 4-year-old who might attend Hudson Elementary. “What about the air and the danger from all those trucks?”

Not far away, in the west Long Beach home where he has lived since 1961, John Cross also is worried.

“If that thing gets built here there are going to be major health problems from it,” Cross said. “Why should kids here get sick just so someone in Des Moines can save $10 on some electronics store items that someone wants to buy?”

State Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) said he couldn’t see supporting the rail project if it used the older trucks that typically ply the short hauls between the ports and local destinations.

“They would take a million trucks off the freeway and lead them right into a neighborhood. That is not acceptable,” Lowenthal said.

BNSF executives have said they expect the proposed rail yard to be the cleanest facility of its kind in the country.

“We will use liquefied natural-gas equipment to move the containers in the yard. We would use all electric cranes that are able to regenerate some of their power when they lower the containers. We would use bio-diesel for the track-switching locomotives,” BNSF spokeswoman Lena Kent said.

In addition, the rail yard, located about four miles north of the L.A. port, would limit any increase in truck traffic and pollution and speed cargo by tapping into the Alameda Corridor, an under-utilized express train corridor that connects the ports to intercontinental rail hubs. Right now, containers taken to the Hobart yard bypass the corridor.

The dispute highlights the ripple effects of exploding international trade. In 2006, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach moved about 8 million 40-foot containers, exceeding 2005’s record pace by more than 11%. By some projections, the ports will handle more than 10 million containers by 2010.

To accommodate ever-growing surges of retail goods from Asia, U.S. seaports are spending billions of dollars on harbor dredging, new cargo terminals and machines to help move more cargo, including taller cranes that can reach across ships wider than a football field. But the next big congestion battle will be waged miles from the sea -- on overburdened freeways, bridges and rail yards.

“BNSF has been at the bleeding edge of the growth in rail traffic out there,” said Paul Bingham, an economist at research firm Global Insight Inc. “They have really been pushed to the wall some weeks just trying to handle all of the cargo.”

Trade and transportation experts see such projects as key to handling the next surge of cargo.

The proposed BNSF yard, located partly outside the ports, is an example of what Kurt Nagle, president of the American Assn. of Port Authorities, calls “connecting infrastructure,” integral links in the cargo transit system.

But keeping pace may be impossible.

“The port itself is becoming secondary to the land access. It’s what’s happening five miles outside the gates. If they cannot expand their intermodal rail yards, people will have to look at alternatives, at other ports,” said Asaf Ashar, research professor with the National Ports & Waterways Institute.

Ashar envisions the development of “truckless” ports in Canada and Mexico that would transfer all of their container cargo directly onto trains.

In Southern California, there are a number of plans for expanded rail facilities, including one by Geraldine Knatz, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, that differs significantly from the BNSF plan. Knatz has suggested developing more “on dock” rail yards at Terminal Island, where containers would be loaded directly onto trains.

No decision has been made on any rail proposals, Knatz said.

BNSF executives argue that the Terminal Island rail project would take longer to complete than their proposal, which is projected to be built by 2009.

“The increases in cargo volume will be here before that on-dock rail facility is completed,” said Dick Ebel, general manager of BNSF’s Los Angeles division.

BNSF’s proposal is still at the beginning of a lengthy process. Port officials are working on the first step, a “notice of preparation” in which the project is laid out for public review.

The size of the property needed for such a facility -- 153 acres -- in an already densely developed area has created hurdles. Most of the site sits on property owned by the Port of Los Angeles, which would have to approve the project. The cities of Carson and Long Beach would have to endorse the project. It also must go through an extensive environmental review.

In the meantime, BNSF officials say they are striving to keep up with Hobart’s cargo traffic.

“Twelve years ago, we laughed when someone said we would be doing 1 million containers at this facility. Now we’re headed toward 1.5 million,” Potempa said. “We’ll do what we can.”

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ron.white@latimes.com