Alameda Corridor

The Alameda Corridor is a 20-mile (32 km) freight rail "expressway" owned by the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority (reporting mark ATAX) that connects the national rail system near downtown Los Angeles, California, to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, running parallel to Alameda Street. The corridor is considered one of the region's largest transportation projects in the past 20 years.

The project is notable for the Mid-Corridor Trench, a below-ground, triple-tracked rail line that is 10 miles (16 km) long, 33 feet (10 m) deep, and 50 feet (15 m) wide, shared by the BNSF Railway and Union Pacific Railroad (UP) via trackage rights. The Alameda Corridor allows trains to bypass 90 miles (140 km) of early 20th-century branch lines and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway's historic Harbor Subdivision along a high-speed grade-separated corridor, built mainly on the alignment of a former Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) line, avoiding more than 200 street-level railroad crossings where automobiles previously had to wait for lengthy freight trains to pass. Many of those same rail lines were inadequately protected with little more than “wigwag” crossing signals dating from the original construction of the lines. One important use of the corridor is to carry cargo containers to and from the ports. The corridor has a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour (64 km/h).

The Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles completed the purchase of SP's Alameda Corridor line for $235 million in December 1994. The line began operation on April 15, 2002, and reached a peak of 60 train movements per day by October 2006. It is credited with significantly relieving congestion on the Long Beach Freeway (I-710) and elsewhere in the region. In 2007 the line carried 17,824 trains carrying 4.7 million TEUs (20-foot equivalent units) of containers.

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