POLB’S Hacegaba says rail upgrades could cut dwell times by 3 days

The Port of Long Beach’s investment in on-dock rail upgrades at its container terminals could reduce rail dwell times from an average of four days from ship to rail to 24 hours when upgrades are completed in 2032, according to the Port’s new CEO, Noel Hacegaba.

Hacegaba said that the rail upgrades at the Port will be supplemented by efficiencies planned by the BNSF railroad’s new Barstow International Gateway, a $1.5 billion state-of-the-art, master-planned integrated rail facility. The facility is being built approximately 130 miles east of the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

The time savings will help the Port of Long Beach compensate for the 2-3 day longer sailing time accessing imports from Southeast Asia, where imports are increasingly being sourced as the market share of trade with China and the United States declines.

As a result, the on-dock rail savings of moving containers onto rail three days faster will compensate for the longer 2–3-day sailing time to and from Southeast Asia ports, Hacegaba said.

Lessons from Davos

Hacegaba spoke to AJOT following his return from the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland (Jan 19–23).

Hacegaba attended and spoke at the WEF: “This was my first Davos, and it was a valuable opportunity to engage directly with global leaders across government, business, and industry. And it offered a unique forum to discuss how supply chains can remain resilient, sustainable, and secure in a rapidly changing world. And this is what I concluded after spending three days there. Because you had 65 heads of state and 830 CEOs who came together to shape the agenda for the future. And the fact that the Port of Long Beach had a seat at the table and had the opportunity to be part of that dialogue was just an incredible honor for me.”

Changes in trade

Hacegaba said that he recognized: “that there are shifts in motion. China, back in 2019, accounted for 70% of our business. Today, that's down to 60%. There's been a shift. That's that. And that trend has been in motion for some time. It's been accelerated as a result of shifting trade policies and tariffs.”

More trans-Pacific cargoes generated from S.E. Asia

What this means is that “as manufacturing shifts from China to Southeast Asia, that adds two to three days to the transit time for that cargo to make its way from Southeast Asia to Long Beach. That means that we, as a Port Authority, a major gateway for the United States, have to find a way to make up for that additional transit time. And this is where our investments in infrastructure, our investments in systems come in.”

However, the Port of Long Beach has a major sailing time advantage over U.S. Atlantic coast ports:” A route from Thailand to Chicago using a U.S. East Coast service is currently anywhere between 49 and 64 days. A comparable service routing through Long Beach arrives in Chicago in 33 days. This means a shipper can gain at least 16 days or as many as 31 days using the Port of Long Beach. Though the cost of shipping is comparable, the savings in transit time are considerable.”

Need for rail connectivity

The key element in the Port’s strategy is rail connectivity: “I said at the State of the Port of Long Beach (2026) that speed to market is the key to our success. Rail connectivity is a key to our future. And that's the way that we remain relevant.”

Pier B on-dock rail project

Hacegaba explained: “We believe that what we're doing here in Long Beach in some way is catalyzing a lot of these investments by the Class Ones (railroads) across the country, and our investments in rail here in Southern California, right through our Pier B on-dock rail project. We're going to triple our on-dock capability, and we're going to enable the faster, quicker movement of cargo from our Port to the nation's key inland rail lines.”

According to a Port of Long Beach position paper, the Pier B On-Dock Rail Support Facility “will enhance on-dock rail capacity at the Port of Long Beach’s shipping terminals, speeding deliveries across the entire national supply chain, easing congestion, and lessening environmental impacts. The project – which began construction in 2024 and is expected to be completed in 2032 – will reconfigure, expand, and enhance the existing Pier B rail yard, and directly connect to on-dock rail facilities and the Alameda Corridor railway.”

Project features:

• The new facility will double the size of the existing Pier B rail yard from 82 acres to 171 acres.
• More than triple the volume of on-dock rail cargo the Port can handle annually, from 1.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) to 4.7 million TEUs.
• The yard will also feature a depot for fueling and servicing up to 30 locomotives at the same time and a full-service staging area to assemble and break down trains up to 10,000 feet long.

The result, Hacegaba says, “So rail connectivity is key to us because when you look at the key rail hubs across the country, whether it's Chicago, Kansas, Memphis, Dallas, by building out our rail capacity, by enabling more on-dock, we're essentially moving more containers inland faster and more sustainably. We're already seeing one of our own terminals in Long Beach, Total Terminal International (TTI), moving over 50% of their container volume on-dock now. I mean, that's a staggering figure.”

Rail dwell times

At the Port of Long Beach, Hacegaba says that rail dwell times at the Port are currently about four days from unloading a container until it is loaded on a rail car: “Right now, average rail dwell across the port complex is just under four days, right from the time a ship arrives at berth to the time that container is set on a train and it leaves the Port in about just under four days. With Pier B, our goal is to get that down to 24 hours.

Time is money

Thus, there is savings in time and money, and this offsets the 2-3 days extra sailing time the Port is experiencing as more import cargoes are shipped from Southeast Asia and away from China: “As trade lanes shift as manufacturing shifts from China to Southeast Asia, that adds two to three days to the transit time. Because by moving containers from the ship to train straight into the key inland rail hubs, you're getting that product to market faster. You're also saving on storage costs. Because you're not staging a container in the Inland Empire in a warehouse, you're not transloading, you're basically moving that container to the destination faster … the staging of trains that was being done here at the Port previously can now be done there in Barstow.”

Barstow International Gateway

The BNSF Railway plans to invest more than $1.5 billion to construct a new, state-of-the-art, master-planned integrated rail facility in Southern California—the first being developed by a Class 1 railroad. Approximately 130 miles from the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the Barstow International Gateway will be located on more than 4,500 acres just west of Barstow, California, where BNSF has operated an existing rail yard for more than 140 years.

BNSF says the new site will facilitate the direct transfer of containers from ships at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to trains for transport through the Alameda Corridor onto the BNSF mainline up to Barstow. Once the containers reach the Barstow International Gateway, they will be processed at the facility using cargo-handling equipment powered by clean energy, and then staged and built into trains moving east via BNSF’s network across the nation. Westbound freight will similarly be processed at the facility to more efficiently bring trains to the ports and other California facilities.

The project proposes:

Rail Facility: Smaller blocks of containers currently tend to dwell at the ports. The facility will reduce this dwell time and accompanying congestion on-dock by allowing these smaller blocks of containers to be moved via train to Barstow.

Intermodal Facility: The intermodal facility’s function will be to transfer shipping containers between rail and the transload warehouses, using electric yard trucks.

Transload Warehouses: The project will include warehouse facilities dedicated to repackaging and processing goods arriving at the Intermodal Facility from international containers into domestic containers. for further transport via rail across the country.

Rail mergers

At the same time, there is a proposed merger of the Union Pacific railroad, which serves the Port, and the Norfolk Southern railroad, which serves 43 ports, including on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and the Great Lakes.

Hacegaba was asked about the impact on Port business: “I think that is an open-ended question whether rail mergers help or hurt our ability to move product from the West Coast to inland destinations? You know. This Union Pacific- Norfolk Southern merger is before the Surface Transportation Board as we speak. They're looking at that. We ourselves are studying that. We're looking at that on paper as a transcontinental railroad that links … both coasts. On paper, it makes sense, but how that actually shows up in an operational sense is still being studied.”