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.
