I am 35 feet under Compton, waiting for a freight train. Thick shafts of late-day sunshine stream into the tunnel and the air is still. But after a few minutes of serenity, a pinpoint of light appears in the distance and grows as the tracks begin to hum. Then, an 8,140-foot-long train towed by two Union Pacific locomotives barrels past at 40 miles per hour. Each train car is double-stacked with 40-foot intermodal containers, a blur of pink and blue and green boxes headed to Colton or Barstow and then maybe to Chicago or St. Louis and then to shopping malls and car dealerships and factory floors. It’s just a regular Tuesday on the Alameda Corridor, an underground superhighway for freight that just might be the most fascinating piece of transportation infrastructure that is invisible to anyone on the street.
I began my afternoon tour on Terminal Island, a massive beehive of cranes and tractor trailers and leviathan container ships. And, I learned, lots of trains. This oceanfront compound, located between Long Beach and San Pedro, is a key piece of the adjoining ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which together cover almost 11,000 acres and represent the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere, handling more than double the shipping volume of anything else in the United States. Americans consume a staggering amount of goods from Asia, and a huge percentage of that stuff spends a few hours on Terminal Island or somewhere else at this massive port complex on its journey to your house or office. Roughly 20 million containers—most of them are 40 feet long—were loaded off or onto a ship at these two ports last year.
At a vantage point on Terminal Island near berths 302 and 305, I meet Michael Leue and Graham Christie, the CEO and COO of the Alameda Corridor Transit Authority (ACTA), the entity that owns and operates the 20-mile railway that connects this megaport to the national rail network near downtown Los Angeles. As cranes offload cargo nearby, Leue explains that roughly 30 percent of the containers that arrive here wind up on a railcar that will traverse the corridor.
Trains have connected this port area to downtown Los Angeles since the 19th century, but until relatively recently, the routes were problematically slow or circuitous. The most direct line, run by Southern Pacific, followed a similar path that the Alameda Corridor does now, but the old tracks could only manage trains at a top speed of 10 miles per hour. And those trains had to traverse more than 200 at-grade crossings—intersections where surface roads crossed the tracks at the same level. Commuters, school buses, and emergency vehicles had to idle in traffic as dozens of daily trains passed through. This persisted into the early 2000s; residents in communities like Wilmington, Compton, and Huntington Park had to deal with persistent noise, delays, and excess car exhaust because of a busy rail corridor that essentially split neighborhoods in half.
The design and construction of this tunnel and train line were remarkably efficient. Originally budgeted at $2 billion, construction began in earnest in 1998. The full corridor was officially opened in April 2002 at a final cost of $2.4 billion. (By contrast, the people mover at LAX is presently running more than three years late and around $1 billion over budget.) And it has since had a massive impact on traffic and noise levels in the communities it passes through. “It’s probably a good thing that most people don’t think about the train line these days,” Leue says. “Because if these trains were blocking traffic or sounding their horns at night, everybody would know about it.”
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An hour after our visit to Terminal Island, our driving tour of the corridor pauses at the Badger Avenue Bridge, a rugged-looking span that crosses Cerritos Channel between the island and the mainland. Inside the ground floor of one of the two bridge towers is a command center that resembles an air traffic control room. Here, several workers coordinate communications with incoming ships and juggle logistics as trains from three port lines funnel toward the Alameda Corridor.
Leue and I take a creaky elevator to a vertiginous observation deck eight stories over the tracks. There’s a panoramic view that anyone who doesn’t suffer from acrophobia would appreciate—the office towers in Long Beach and Los Angeles, the sparkling expanse of the Pacific, the mountainous hulk of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and an infinite expanse of transportation infrastructure. When viewed from outer space, this vast complex is said to be the most identifiable man-made feature of California.
Not surprisingly, there is a human cost to all this industry and commerce. Even by L.A. standards, there are few things as predictably soul crushing as a traffic jam on the southernmost stretch of the 710 freeway. The problem, of course, has deeper implications than traffic delays. The residential areas surrounding this industrial zone, largely populated by low-income people of color, have long dealt with some of the worst air quality in Southern California. In Wilmington, the community just north of the Port of Los Angeles, one in three households reports a family member with cancer, and more than half say someone has asthma, according to a Grist investigation. Health experts, community activists, and local media have at times referred to the area as a “diesel death zone.” The causes of the pollution and health impacts are complicated, and the entities that control the ports (and other area businesses like refineries) are making progress to meet long-term environmental mandates, but there is just no escaping the thousands of diesel-powered semis that crawl through the area day and night.
The train is a key part of the solution. Each 8,000-foot train that barrels beneath Compton replaces 750 truck trips on local freeways. Leue says that an average of about 30 trains blitz the corridor every day, some as long as 18,000 feet, eliminating more than 25,000 daily truck trips. The impacts add up: The ACTA estimates that since the Alameda Corridor opened in 2002, the line has replaced roughly six billion miles of truck traffic. That translates into reducing 52 tons of carbon monoxide and 205 tons of nitrogen oxide annually from surrounding communities.
Given these sizable benefits, there’s pressure on the ACTA to go further—requests for electrification and transportation of containers exclusively on trains. It would be possible to electrify the corridor using overhead catenary wires, but the trains and locomotives that pass through continue seamlessly to traverse thousands of miles into the interior of the country using the vast rail networks operated by freight giants Union Pacific and BNSF. But electrifying that system is just not feasible yet: “Mitigating impacts on the community is a key part of our purpose,” Leue says, noting that the freight industry has its own long-term emission goals to meet. “It remains a long-term goal.”
Meanwhile, dollars and logistics complicate the quest to shift more containers to rail. For any shipments that have a final destination less than 100 miles from the ports, truck transport is quicker and more cost-effective than trains, particularly as inland rail yards have not been developed and warehouses are more widely dispersed. And a huge amount of cargo heads by truck to distribution centers and logistics hubs called transloading facilities. If you ever have flown into LAX and stared out the window during the last 20 minutes of your descent, you may have noticed a 60-mile-long corridor of warehouses stretching west from San Bernardino toward downtown L.A. Here, companies store and re-sort and dispatch goods (by truck and train) in larger containers than the massive oceangoing ships I saw earlier at the port.
From the Badger Avenue Bridge, Leue, Christie, and I trace Alameda Street and the rail line north. (The corridor is named after the wide, 200-year-old north-south boulevard it follows for most of its journey from the ports to downtown.) They point out a variety of walls, fences, security cameras, and other technology to discourage theft, graffiti, and curious onlookers who could be hurt by fast-moving trains. Christie jokes about “foamers”—train enthusiasts who may go to great lengths to get near freight trains and interesting infrastructure. When asked if he’s a foamer, Christie shakes his head from side to side. “No way,” he says with a laugh. “I love trains, but it’s not like a hobby of mine.”
Our final stop is the Greenleaf Pump Station in Compton, one of several facilities along the subterranean stretch of railway that make sure that occasional heavy rains won’t flood the tunnel and delay the 24-7 train traffic. A security contractor disables a robust series of locks, alarms, and other safeguards to allow us to walk down a few staircases to the track level. It’s oddly quiet down here—a tableau of pristine concrete and soft light and metal rails stretching into the distance. It’s like an industrial sculpture garden.
When the freight train finally blasts by, it’s surprisingly exhilarating—the raw horsepower of the locomotives, the blurred colors of the containers, the metronomic click-clack of the wheels, the cool breeze, the eternal mystery of where nearly two miles of stuff is going. (I’m pretty sure I had a grin on my face. I don’t think I’ll ever be a foamer, but I can briefly appreciate the magic of being so close to a train.)
Then, even before the back of the train has passed, we ascend the stairs to the bright sunlight of the street. Cars zoom by with music pouring out of open windows and the world hums and I can no longer hear the train rumbling toward the American frontier. It is like a powerful, beautiful secret.•
Peter Flax is a Los Angeles–based journalist. The author of the book Live to Ride, Flax was most recently the editor in chief at the Red Bulletin and the features editor at the Hollywood Reporter. He has lived in Los Angeles for 12 years without owning a car and has done more than 75,000 miles of commuting on his bicycle.
