Transportation

The chief executive of one of the nation's biggest railroads spent Monday promoting a plan to build a $300-million rail yard close to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where cargo containers would be loaded directly onto trains instead of being trucked up the Long Beach Freeway. Matthew K. Rose, chairman, chief executive and president of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, touted the project, which would be located four miles from the ports.

The owner of a fluff-and-fold laundry in a small western Oregon town couldn't be happier that tons of mud, rocks, snow and fir trees sloughed off a hillside one day in January. No one was hurt when the landslide took out the Union Pacific Railroad's main track through the Cascades south of Eugene, but it has severed a key rail link between Los Angeles and Seattle. The slide spans 3,000 feet.

Charitie McArthur says she bleeds Dodger blue. She thinks Vin Scully is a genius, wept with joy when Steve Finley's grand slam clinched a division title in 2004 and scored big when she got married at home plate at Dodger Stadium the following summer. But as the team returns to town this week for the new season, the 32-year-old teacher from Redondo Beach is already cringing. It's not the team's prospects that have her down, but the prospect of the bad traffic expected at this weekend's games.

Transportation officials are so intent on building a toll road through south Orange County that they refuse to remove it from long-range plans, even though a powerful state commission has vetoed the route. Frustrated environmentalists and others said this week that the Orange County Transportation Authority's reluctance to change its assumption that the Foothill South tollway through San Onofre State Beach will be built amounts to "putting their head in the sand."

It used to be called the Freeway Series and it was as much a part of the Southland sports scene as Rams football and title fights at the Olympic Auditorium. The Rams moved to St. Louis in 1995, however, and the Olympic played host to its final sporting event three years ago. And now the three-game spring training series between the Dodgers and Angels appears ready to fade away as well.

Motorists in Los Angeles County could end up paying an extra 9 cents per gallon at the gas pump, or an additional $90 on their vehicle registration, under proposals aimed at getting them to help fight global warming. Voters would be able to decide whether to approve a "climate change mitigation and adaptation fee" under legislation being considered by state lawmakers and endorsed by the board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The nation's top hauler of container rail freight, BNSF Railway Co., is parking miles of rail cars in Montana and elsewhere because there isn't enough freight to keep them rolling. Cars that often carry 40-foot containers of goods shipped from Asia stand like an iron fence between the Missouri River and this Montana burg known for world-class fly fishing. They stretch as far as Sandee Cardinal can see when she stands outside her home on the river's west bank between Helena and Great Falls.

The modest Japanese sedan made its way down the gravel drive between the cow pasture and the dirt basketball court, kicking up a cloud of dust before coming to rest beside Roy Saulsberry Jr.'s ancient gas pumps. A passenger stepped out, clutching an old antifreeze jug. Outside Roy's Grocery & Package store, the regulars were hemming and hawing on a wooden bench, under the spell of the afternoon's slow rhythm.

While much of the world argues over whether biofuels made from corn are worsening world hunger, the debate in California is shifting to new state rules that could revolutionize the way fuels are judged. A gathering this week in Sacramento offered a glimpse of a complex "poly-fuel" future that promised substantial environmental benefits as well as wrenching change for California's transportation systems.

The federal government has offered Los Angeles County $213 million to convert carpool lanes to special, congestion-pricing toll lanes on three freeways, according to county government documents. The freeways involved first would be short stretches of Interstates 10 and 210 in the San Gabriel Valley, and then, if any money remained, part of the 110 south of downtown Los Angeles. The federal funding, however, would come to L.A.