Long Haul on Short Line : Transportation: The longest trip on the Los Angeles Junction Railway is just a few miles. But the line provides crucial service at a busy freight hub.

There are days when train engineer Robert E. Nelson gets the urge to sound four warning toots on his huge air horn and then hang a right at Vernon’s Downey Road.

A set of railroad tracks running along the busy street are part of Union Pacific’s main line. And they could take his 175-ton locomotive where Nelson can only dream of going.

That would be the wide-open spaces, places where Nelson could open the 1,500-horsepower engine’s throttle and see for himself whether it can really go 120 m.p.h., as its speedometer says.

Nelson has reason to be curious. During the 17 years he has worked for the Los Angeles Junction Railway Co., he has never driven his locomotive faster than 10 m.p.h.

There’s never been any need for speed, though. Covering a mere five miles, his railroad is one of the nation’s smallest.

For 70 years, however, Los Angeles Junction Railway has remained one of the country’s busiest. It delivers boxcars brought across country by Union Pacific, Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads to 400 factories in a 2,800-acre industrial district in the cities of Vernon, Maywood, Bell and Commerce.

On Thursday, the three big railroads tossed a trackside birthday party for their tiny partner. Nelson and the LAJRR’s 42 other employees were invited to park their engines and munch on barbecue as a musician played “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” on a piano.

Without the line, there would be “utter mass confusion” five miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, where the three rival railroads’ tracks converge, agreed Santa Fe’s Mike Martin, Southern Pacific’s Jack O’Connell and Union Pacific’s Gary Davidson.

If the rival railroads tried to share rail spurs, “they’d be fighting over who gets what track and who got there first,” LAJRR spokesman Bob Brogger said.

Bill Edwards, assistant general manager for the Los Angeles Junction line, said the three big railroads haul nearly 15,000 boxcars, tank cars and grain-carrying hopper cars into his line’s switching yards each year. From there, his four locomotives pull them to factories over 63 miles of spurs for a $313-per-car fee.

Companies ranging from glass and pet food manufacturers to paper and chemical plants, warehouses and cold-storage facilities rely on the railway for delivery of raw materials and the shipment of finished products.

Engineer Norm Culver said the three-member locomotive crews travel about 150 miles a day.

Culver said engineers and switchmen stay alert for automobiles at 76 street crossings and for pedestrians using the tracks as shortcuts between neighboring factories.

“We have everything the transcontinental railroads have: derailments, sideswipes, spilled loads,” said railway retiree Kyle Harrell, who put in 36 years on the line. He returned for Thursday’s party along with retired manager Bill Parks, who spent 41 years with the company.

Los Angeles Junction officials said their company was formed in 1922 by a group of Chicago businessmen who hoped rail service would lure tenants to a 300-acre manufacturing district they were building next to the Los Angeles River. By 1928, the tiny line had 27 miles of track and was serving 87 businesses. The private railway became a subsidiary of Santa Fe in 1972.

These days, officials said LAJRR does something that some other railroads can’t: It delivers “a seven-digit profit” each year.