Yesterday I saw the last couple cars of a Harbor-bound doublestack train in Torrance, near the 190th Street bridge. It is rare that these trains use this line now; the segment between El Segundo north through Inglewood is rarely used these days.
LA/Long Beach port traffic is booming, though the Alameda Corridor itself never seems to be that crowded. Trains are concentrated on the piers and other loading areas.
Maybe they were doing so maintenance on the Alameda Corridor and if the train was held for it BNSF would have been fined by the customer or have to pay demurrage fees.
Could be; I don’t have any other ideas. This evening either the same train was there or another train was in its place. They do not normally store double-stack cars in Torrance (on the segment of line that passes under Prairie Ave. and bisects the ExxonMobil refinery. If the train is still there Saturday I’ll check further.
The Alameda Corridor is 3 tracks wide for the entire distance so it would be hard to imagine they’d close the entire thing.
BNSF will hang on to that escape valve as long as it can. With 115 CWR, it will do well for a long time. Hiding a train down from El Segundo on south to Watson Yard would be a good deal (no at-grade crossings)…Running alongside Slauson Avenue on the upper portion of the Harbor Sub. is a pain with all the crossing frogs and at-grade crossings. Would not be surprised if a local emergency, signal or congestion problem surfaced in the Alameda Hole as it goes through some rough neighborhoods.
That is an understatement.
It turns out the train “hung out” in Torrance, engine idling, until sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning.
Actually there are several crossings between El Segundo and Watson, although nowhere near the number where it runs along Slauson. I work right by the Marine Ave. crossing, formerly Compton Ave. in north Redondo Beach (ATSF-BNSF kept the old name on the relay box for many years after the street name changed).
For a while the line segment that passes the east end of the runways at LAX [airport]had special freight cars stored there – they were like flatcars with stakes (possibly used for plane parts?). I don’t know if they were an anti-terrorism move or just a coincidence. The rails were solidly rusted there for a while.
It kind of remides me of a train that when into a siding because it hit set off the hotbox detecter and a couple of priority intermodals were enroute. Rather than make the intermodals change tracks, dispatch routed the train on to another subdivision. By the time the train finnished, the original subdivision was so damn busy that dispatch decided that he could proceed on the new one as it would take him to his destination as well. The end
Actually I was comparing it to a CN train in Georgetown, the trains for some reason when on to the GEXR line to London, a couple of Chicago/Toronto intermodal were coming in or out of Brampton and saw them within minutes. But rather than the train back up onto the Halton Subdivision, it just kept on going.