SoCal ports and foreign trade

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

An article in the Business section of the LA Times today (21 Nov 2006) has this info:

More than 800,000 cargo containers full of dolls, socks, toys, and other stuff flowed in through the Port of Los Angeles in the month of October. That’s a new record. Laid end to end these containers would stretch 3000 miles. About 60% of the goods will go to SoCal and the rest will be sent east.

Some of the containers shipped out of SoCal will go by truck. Most will go on the BNSF Railway, with a slightly smaller amount on the Union Pacific RR. If I take an 8 mile drive I can sit comfortably on the patio of the Fullerton, CA Amtrak station and watch more than 50 one-mile-and-a-half-long trains a day thunder eastward on the BNSF Transcon Line.

And just for fun, the Port of Long Beach (which is right next door) unloaded 650,000 containers with the same kind of cargo. That means that, in total, about 400,000 containers (about 1500 miles in length) headed east from SoCal JUST IN OCTOBER.

Merry Christmas,

Jack

2

Does anyone know how much tonnage comes in and goes out through LA / Long Beach in a year ?

How do they compare to the 75 million tons moving through Vancouver, Canada in a year ?

3

2004 Long Beach: 79,708,000 short tons including 5,184,930 loaded TEUs

2004 Los Angeles Harbor: 53,363,000 short tons including 3,900,587 loaded TEUs

2004 Port of Vancouver: 81,130,000 short tons including 1,665,000 TEUs

Vancouver tonnage is dominated by bulk commodities – coal, grain, sulfur, potash; coal is 44% of the bulk tonnage at the port. The major bulk commodity handled at Los Angeles and Long Beach is crude and refined petroleum.

S. Hadid

4

Thanks.