(The following story by Larry Rand appeared at DesertDispatch.com on December 14.)
VICTORVILLE, Calif. — The multimodal rail yard proposed for Southern California Logistics Airport won’t make another main line through the Cajon Pass inevitable, according to a railroad spokesman.
“It’s already inevitable,” said Bob Brendza, director of facility development for the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad. “It’s not a question of if, but of when.”
Brendza said more than 120 trains a day move through the Cajon Pass. That’s a train every 12 minutes, 24 hours a day.
When asked what capacity was during a City Council presentation he did in November, Brendza said, “100 trains.”
While he was joking, Brendza said later that the main line through the Cajon Pass is “very close to capacity.”
In addition to 100 BNSF trains daily through the pass, the Union Pacific runs “20 to 22 trains a day” on BNSF track and a UP line that cuts west towards Palmdale, according to Joe Bromley, a UP spokesman.
No date for a new main line has been targeted, according to Brendza.
“We’re looking at planning right now,” he said. “There’s nothing definitive, but Southern California is a priority area for our company.”
Burlington Northern-Santa Fe spent $1.7 billion on capital investment in 2003 and plans to spend $1.9 billion next year.
With container cargo set to triple by 2030, according to projections by the Southern California Association of Governments, more trains and another main line would help to alleviate what is already the worst highway congestion in the United States. More than 14,000 big trucks use the Cajon Pass each day, most of them 5-axle “doubles.” Each freight train takes 280 trucks’ worth of cargo off the highway.
Larry Mallon, a transportation expert working on a study for the U.S. Departments of Defense and Transportation, has theorized that double-stacked, short-haul container trains could run in off-peak hours from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to an outlying destination such as the airport’s proposed rail yard to alleviate congestion in L.A.
Brendza said there is a problem with Mallon’s thesis.
“It’s going to be difficult for him to find off-peak hours for the railroad,” Brendza said. “We’re running trains 24/7.”
“Destination 2030,” a new draft report from SCAG, the regional planning agency, warned of potential transportation gridlock if infrastructure isn’t built. The report suggested a regional railroad authority to tax the UP and BNSF to finance projects like grade separations. Predictably, Brendza wasn’t moved by the notion.
“We’re pretty good stewards of our own money,” he said.
“The railroad authority is strictly conceptual at this point,” said Jeff Lustgarten, a SCAG spokesman, “but there needs to be a potential means to oversee the increasing of capacity. If we don’t deal with the traffic situation, the freight business will simply go elsewhere.”