A Contentious Cargo Plan

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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 Los Angeles Times reports.


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.


Read the full L.A. Times story

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