October 2022
BNSF Railway announces plans to build the Barstow International Gateway Project—a-first-of-its-kind integrated rail facility in Southern California.
BNSF Railway announces plans to build the Barstow International Gateway Project—a-first-of-its-kind integrated rail facility in Southern California.
BNSF Railway plans to invest more than $1.5 billion to construct a state-of-the-art master-planned rail facility in Southern California—and the first being developed by a Class 1 railroad. The Barstow International Gateway will be an approximately 4,500-acre new integrated rail facility on the west side of Barstow, consisting of a rail yard, intermodal facility and warehouses for transloading freight from international containers to domestic containers.
The facility will allow the direct transfer of containers from ships at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to trains for transport through the Alameda Corridor onto the BNSF mainline up to Barstow.
Once the containers reach the Barstow International Gateway, they will be processed at the facility using cargo-handling equipment powered by clean energy, and then staged and built into trains moving east via BNSF’s network across the nation. Westbound freight will similarly be processed at the facility to more efficiently bring trains to the ports and other California terminals.
Currently, most international cargo at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach arrives in 40-foot containers that are then trucked from the ports to warehouses in Los Angeles or the Inland Empire. Once the containers arrive at the warehouses, they are unloaded, sorted, and reloaded onto 53-foot domestic containers that are either transported by truck to a rail yard in Los Angeles, where they are transferred onto trains or simply trucked across the country. This process creates inefficiencies and unnecessary truck trips within the Los Angeles Basin and Inland Empire that can impact supply chain distribution, the environment, and communities surrounding ports and warehouses.
The Barstow International Gateway will allow cargo to be transported by rail directly from the ports through the Alameda Corridor to Barstow and processed efficiently between the intermodal rail facility and the on-site transload warehouse facilities, without generating additional on-road truck trips. The transload warehouses will expedite repackaging and processing of goods into domestic containers for further transport via rail across the country.