Former B&O No. 2401, an SD20-2 rebuild, works the Pacific Harbor Line in Long Beach, California in February, 2005.
(Morven, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, via Wikimedia Commons)
PACIFIC HARBOR LINE
The Pacific Harbor Line (reporting mark PHL) was formed in 1998 to take over the Harbor Belt Line (HBL). In 1998, the Alameda Corridor was nearing completion, allowing for a massive amount of railroad traffic from the largest harbors in the Western hemisphere: Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach.
The railroad has 18 route miles (29 km) with a web of 59 miles (95 km) of track.
Company Sketch
The PHL, privately owned by the Anacostia Rail Holdings Company, operates on tracks and facilities owned by the ports. The PHL is a neutral switching railroad that serves shippers at this large port complex. PHL handles 40,000 carloads of freight a year, excluding intermodal traffic. The Alameda Corridor provides rail service to the port complex through the BNSF and Union Pacific Railroad.
History
The original Harbor Belt Line was formed in 1929 by a joint agreement of the city of Los Angeles and four major railroads: the Pacific Electric (PE) lines, the Southern Pacific (SP), the Santa Fe Railway (ATSF) and the Union Pacific (UP). Each railroad agreed to supply a quota of employees and equipment to provide switching services within a "unified zone" containing 117 miles (188 km) of track. In 1959 the employees of the Harbor Belt Line filed a dispute with the National Railroad Adjustment Board arguing that the employees of the Pacific Fruit Express were performing work on the line which was designated as word for the employees of the Harbor Belt Line. The railroad also operated a joint freight agency for handling smaller station shipments. PE merged into SP in 1965, leaving three railroads to operate the HBL. The ATSF would also be part of a merger in 1996, forming the new Burlington Northern & Santa Fe (BNSF), and the SP and UP would merge into the current Union Pacific in February 1998.
Also in 1998, the HBL was re-organized as the Pacific Harbor Line to create a more even distribution system for shippers using the ports and the two surviving railroads (BNSF and UP). Although HBL's switching operations had been handled jointly, shippers could have problems getting their goods to or from the port depending on where an individual railroad interchanged with the HBL. The PHL aimed to resolve these issues.
Pacific Harbor Line was named the 2009 Short Line Railroad of the Year by Railway Age magazine.
In July 2013, Pacific Harbor Line signed a new five-year collective agreement with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), which has represented workers at the company since PHL was formed in 1998. A new five-year contract was signed and took effect in September 2020.
On March 31, 2020, Eduardo Moreno attempted to crash a PHL train into the hospital ship USNS Mercy, which was in the Port of Los Angeles to provide Los Angeles with additional hospital capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic in California, but the train stopped approximately 250 yards (230 m) from the ship.
PHL was the first railroad to have its locomotive fleet composed only of Tier II and Tier III "clean diesel" locomotives. An EMD Joule Battery Electric Locomotive arrived in 2023 for testing and demonstration purposes for 2 years.
Overview
Parent company: Anacostia Rail Holdings Company
Headquarters: Wilmington, California
Reporting mark: PHL
Locale: Port of Los Angeles/Port of Long Beach, California
Dates of operation: 1998–present
Technical
Track gauge: 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
Length: 18 mi (29 km)
Track length: 59 mi (95 km)
Other
Website: anacostia.com/railroads/phl
