LOS ANGELES – The heavy-metal clash as rail cars slam together is like a symphony to Andrew Fox, and he can hear just how well each note is played as trains assemble on the railroad he runs.
On a recent morning, Fox winced only once.
“It can be too hard or too soft. You can just tell when it isn’t quite right,” said Fox, president of Pacific Harbor Line Inc., which operates inside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Even during a global recession that has slowed cargo traffic at the ports to its lowest level in at least five years, there have been few sour notes for Pacific Harbor Line. With routes that, end to end, measure only 18 miles combined, it is one of the nation’s smallest short-line railroads. But it is also one of the most important.
The railroad’s job is to break down trains as they arrive and send their cargo containers to the ports’ nine terminals. It also assembles trains that haul freight to much of the nation, connecting to the Union Pacific and BNSF transcontinental rail lines.
“We’re like the valet parking for the harbor,” Fox says.
In its 11 years of operation, Pacific Harbor Line has helped propel the harbor to its No. 1 spot; the two ports move more cargo in a year than the combined totals of the nation’s next five biggest ports.
This year, Railway Age magazine named Pacific Harbor Line short-line railroad of the year for replacing its fleet with diesel-electric locomotives.
In an era when railroads are still often perceived as “dirty players that just produce smog and soot and grit,” according to Railway Age Managing Editor Douglas John Bowen, Pacific Harbor Line is forging relationships that the rest of the rail industry needs to emulate.
The magazine dubbed the company “the greenest railroad in America.”
With financial help from the Port of Los Angeles and South Coast Air Quality Management District, Pacific Harbor Line has acquired 22 locomotives, each no more than 2 years old and classified as low or ultra-low for their diesel emissions.
That’s especially unusual for short-line railroads. They tend to have older engines, some of which have been run extensively by major railroads.
“The players in the Los Angeles Basin have all been able to achieve productive consensus where everyone gets something out of it,” Bowen said. “That might not seem novel out there, but from our vantage point, it’s borderline radical. Wow, people actually cooperating.”
Fox got the job of president after he served as a consultant to Anacostia & Pacific, which helped form Pacifice Harbor Line in 1998. He is Pacific Harbor’s first president.
“This was going to be a chance to do something that hadn’t been done before. It was going to be an opportunity to run your own show, to do things the way you think they ought to be done,” said Fox, who got hooked on trains while watching them behind his father’s business in Berkeley, Calif.
