Nestled within the Mojave Desert, Needles is an oasis for railroaders and railfans. The city was founded as a crew change point for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, a forerunner to one of our predecessor railways, the Santa Fe Railway. In the early 1900s, Needles served as a vital stopover that provided water for livestock,…
BNSF Railway plans to invest more than $1.5 billion to construct a state-of-the-art master-planned rail facility in Southern California. 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 project will bring thousands of direct jobs to California’s high desert communities, reduce highway and port congestion, and maximize rail and distribution efficiency regionally and across the U.S. supply chain.
The Southern California International Gateway (SCIG) would have been a $500+ million investment by BNSF to build a new, state of the art intermodal railyard facility located within four miles of the San Pedro Bay ports, resulting in improvement of both traffic congestion and air quality in the region. BNSF committed to making SCIG the greenest intermodal facility in the U.S., by investing more than $130 million in green technology, including electric cranes, ultra-low emissions switching locomotives and liquefied natural gas (LNG) or equivalent yard equipment.
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