Conception and Development of the Alameda Corridor

By Rob Leachman

Construction of new railroad lines in the USA, especially in urban areas, is rare in this day and age. But a Berkeley faculty member and his students were instrumental in making the Alameda Corridor, a 25-mile triple-tracked rail line between the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and main-line railroad connections near downtown Los Angeles come to life.

Background

The natural harbor for Southern California is San Pedro Bay, straddling the border between Los Angeles and Long Beach. But until World War II, San Pedro Bay was not a significant port of entry for the United States. On the West Coast, the primary ports were San Francisco and Seattle. As a result, main-line railroads reaching Los Angeles were built to downtown, not to the waterfront. (See Figure 1.) Points on San Pedro Bay were connected to downtown by branch lines and interurban lines.

World War II and the subsequent tremendous population growth in Southern California provided the impetus for growth of the San Pedro Bay Ports (Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach). The growth also transformed the environment through which the branch lines and interurban lines traversed from the countryside into urban neighborhoods. Three transcontinental railroads served the Los Angeles Basin at the time: Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and ATSF (commonly referred to as Santa Fe). Figure 2 shows the 1982 Los Angeles rail network overlaid on a Google Earth view of this dense urban region.UP lines are shown in yellow, SP in red, and ATSFin blue.

In the 1970s, as containerized ocean shipping began displacing break-bulk shipping, the growth in trade volume via the San Pedro Bay Ports accelerated. At the start of the 1980s, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were predicting substantial growth in bulk exports as well as continued strong growth in containerized imports and exports. At the time, none of the many marine terminals within the Ports had sufficient trackage for loading and unloading stack trains. Most containerized imports destined for regions east of the Rockies were de-vanned in the communities surrounding the ports, re-loaded into trailers, and drayed to main-line rail intermodal terminals near downtown Los Angeles.

Story Source
Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies