A Future Tied to the Tracks

When a runaway Union Pacific train jumped the tracks in Commerce this summer, spilling its load of lumber on a residential community, it served as a perverse reminder of one of the realities of 21st century life in Southern California.

This, for better and worse, is the Golden Age of Rail.

Freight trains carry about half the goods arriving at and departing from the region’s busy twin ports. At the same time, more commuter trains are running all the time, including the recently opened Gold Line.

Altogether, more than 35,000 trains, many of them longer than a mile, course through the region every year, carrying considerably more than $100 billion worth of goods and 60 million passengers.

How important is the Southern California rail network? Consider this: An estimated 60% of the rail cargo arriving in Chicago each day began its land journey at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Increasingly, trains carry the regional economy on their seamless tracks. They lug cars from Korea and lumber from the Pacific Northwest, sneakers from Indonesia and scrap iron from Tennessee, salt from Mexico and corn syrup from Nebraska, cement from Thailand and pork from Iowa, shoes from Malaysia and hay from El Centro, and a flood of consumer goods from China.

As the rail network has grown, it has caused strains. Trains tie up car traffic at more than 100 busy crossings in and around Los Angeles, periodically killing impatient drivers who skirt crossing gates.

Trains also pollute. Although railroads have agreed to use their cleanest-burning locomotives in Southern California, diesel emissions from trains contribute significantly to regional pollution, spewing about 36 tons of nitrogen oxide into the air daily. That is a small amount compared to that expelled by diesel trucks, but still worrisome to air quality officials, who say railroads are all but immune to environmental regulation.

With demand surging for both freight and passenger rail, congestion is becoming increasingly commonplace at chokepoints in the system. And since forecasts call for more than doubling rail traffic over the next 20 years, industry officials warn that construction of new tracks and rail yards will be necessary to keep the network -- and the region’s economy -- rolling.

Although it’s easy for most people to overlook, Los Angeles has long been a railroad town.

The first line opened in 1869 and connected the growing pueblo -- today’s downtown -- to the harbor in distant Wilmington.

Today the Los Angeles-Long Beach seaport is the third-busiest in the world after Hong Kong and Singapore. It is an outsized Erector Set of a place, where trains and trucks, ships and cranes are in constant motion.

Part of the harbor’s appeal to shippers is the efficient Southern California rail connection. Say you’re trying to get a computer part from Shanghai to Dell Computer in Austin, Texas. Going through Seattle or Oakland will send the part on a serpentine trip over multiple train lines. Going through Los Angeles can cut three or four days off the shipping time.

At the APM Terminal at the Port of Los Angeles, run by Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller, railroad tracks run to within yards of massive container ships.

“Trains come in, we load them and -- boom! -- we get ‘em out of Dodge,” said Trevor Washington, manager of rail operations for APM. It works that way 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

From the port, the trains head up the Alameda Corridor, a 20-mile stretch of track that opened a little more than a year ago at a cost of $2.5 billion, shouldered mostly by the federal government. It parallels the original San Pedro-to-Los Angeles railroad line, but with two major advantages: It is straighter, hence faster, and it runs beneath street level for 10 miles, allowing vehicular traffic to flow above it on bridges.

Many rail officials and shippers praise the Alameda Corridor, saying it has cut a three- to four-hour trip that ran through 200 street crossings to a 45-minute trip with no crossings. That has made it not only faster but significantly safer and saved automobile drivers countless hours of inconvenience.

Some argue that the corridor hasn’t boosted rail traffic as much as promised. But from the railroads’ perspective, the biggest problem with the Alameda Corridor is that it ends. When it does that, just south of the Santa Monica Freeway on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, it dumps trains onto less streamlined tracks that grow thick with congestion.

“A lot of us argue that all the Alameda Corridor did was just push the bottleneck north and east,” said Steven P. Erie, director of the urban studies and planning program at UC San Diego and an expert on the region’s rail network.

Mostly east, where local transportation officials hope to spend $1 billion upgrading tracks to separate trains and cars at 20 busy intersections by 2010. From downtown, rail lines serving Union Pacific, Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the Metrolink commuter line head east to Pomona, Riverside and Colton, and southeast to Fullerton and beyond. East of Fullerton, the BNSF line swings north, eventually connecting with the more northerly route at Colton. The intersection of those two lines is the busiest spot in the region.

Colton, a place of no particular fame in the everyday world of most Southern Californians, occupies an important position in the rail world, along with other spots whose names have little resonance in the general population: Hobart, Metrolink Flyover, East Bank Line, Redondo Junction.

These include busy rail intersections and vast “intermodal” rail yards where freight is transferred between trucks and trains. BNSF says its Hobart Yard, on Washington Boulevard just southeast of downtown Los Angeles, is the busiest such yard in the country, handling more than 1 million cargo containers a year. It is a long, narrow strip of constant activity, a seeming maze of trucks, trains and long rows of 40- and 50-foot containers fresh off ships.

In terms of traffic, though, it still isn’t as busy as Colton, just southwest of San Bernardino, where more than 160 trains roll through on a peak day. At UP’s Colton Yard, the largest rail yard in Southern California, more than 1,500 rail cars come through on a typical day.

The pivotal role of this junction is indicative of a larger trend, in which the Inland Empire of Riverside and San Bernardino counties has become a sort of inland harbor, where tons of goods arrive at warehouses for sorting, repacking and then shipment by both truck and train.

Trucks are still the carriers of choice for short hauls and deliver virtually all of the products destined for the huge Southern California market. Regardless of what happens to the rail system, truck traffic on local roads is destined to grow far heavier over the next 20 years, barring some economic cataclysm. But for long hauls, trains are often the shipping method of choice.

Add in the increased popularity of commuter trains and you have a growing problem.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority runs commuter trains on light-rail routes such as the Blue Line between Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles, and the new Gold Line from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena. Those trains can cause congestion on streets they cross, but they run independently of the larger rail network. The larger, longer-distance Metrolink trains, however, run mostly on UP or BNSF tracks, helping to strain their capacity.

Already, congestion is beginning to clog the tracks running to Colton, as well as on nearby spurs such as one that runs between Pomona and Riverside. The freight railroads, which own most of the tracks, say it’s not a major problem for them -- yet. The burden, for the moment, falls more heavily on Metrolink. Congestion is a more critical issue for a commuter rail line, because a 20- or 30-minute delay means far more than it might to a freight train making a cross-country trip.

What the railroads, and local political leaders, argue is that Southern California’s rail infrastructure is a national problem, one that Congress needs to take a role in funding.

“These are projects of national economic significance,” said John Young, who handles transportation issues for Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Carson).

Millender-McDonald, whose district takes in a chunk of the Alameda Corridor and whose largest block of campaign funds comes from transportation unions, has created a congressional “goods movement” caucus to focus on shipping issues. But in Washington’s current climate, Young would say only that, “intellectually,” members of Congress understand the need for more spending on rail infrastructure in the region.

Federal help is especially important in funding projects to separate rail and auto traffic. Despite the increase in rail traffic, the number of accidents involving trains and cars has actually been on the decline for years, as railroads have sponsored educational campaigns to alert drivers to the dangers. Still, one of the biggest decreases in such accidents occurred last year, after the Alameda Corridor opened.

And safety aside, projects such as the Alameda Corridor and its planned extension east save drivers from having to wait at crossings while mile-long trains rumble by.

As rail traffic grows heavier, “The burden really shifts to the residents of Southern California,” Young said, “because you’re sitting in traffic all the time. Ultimately, if something doesn’t get done, it’s going to be ... gridlock.”

Everyone seems to agree that growth in trade and in rail traffic is all but inevitable. It is also desirable, argued Hasan M. Ikhrata, director of planning and policy for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

The future economic health of the region “will depend on how well we move the goods,” Ikhrata said in an interview. “We lost the aerospace industry. We believe our future lies in trade.”