$500M Facility Upgrades Concept of Intermodal

LOS ANGELES-BNSF Railway has released a draft environmental impact report for the railroad’s proposed Southern California International Gateway, a $500 million intermodal facility that would allow containers to be loaded onto rail four miles from the docks, rather than traveling 24 miles to downtown rail facilities. The project is designed to be “the greenest intermodal facility in the US,” according to an announcement from BNSF, which states that the new facility “will allow 1.5 million more containers to move by more efficient and environmentally preferred rail through the Alameda Corridor each year, greatly reducing truck traffic congestion in Southern California.”

The EIR concludes that SCIG reduces health risk to a far greater extent than even the port’s own goals for new projects. In building SCIG, BNSF will clean up an existing industrial site and replace it with a facility featuring wide-span all-electric cranes, ultra-low emission switching locomotives and low-emission rail yard equipment.