BNSF's planned Barstow hub would build 9 million square feet of rail-locked warehouse space

The Barstow International Gateway, the $4 billion rail and warehouse complex BNSF plans on roughly 4,500 acres west of the city, is built around an operation the railroad calls cross-dock intermodal. In BNSF's own description, filed with the state in February, almost every container would arrive and leave the facility by train rather than truck: boxes run from Los Angeles and Long Beach up the Alameda Corridor to Barstow, where electric equipment moves them between railcars and an on-site warehouse center for sorting and reloading into domestic containers, then back onto trains headed east.

That on-site warehouse center is the part an IE operator should read closely. BNSF's filing puts it at roughly 9 million square feet of transload warehouses, staffed by about 2,767 workers when the facility opens in 2028 and rising past 4,200 by 2048. The railroad would write volume commitments into tenants' leases — occupancy is conditioned on moving a set amount of freight through BNSF's rail network using the cross-dock operation. The warehouse and the rail service come as one product, controlled end to end by the railroad.

This is a sharper thing than freight simply moving further from the ports. Today, international containers landing at the ports are largely trucked to warehouses in Los Angeles or the IE, unloaded, and reloaded — the drayage-and-transload work that fills buildings across the region. BNSF's public affairs director, Lena Kent, has described that current setup as containers and trucks moving all over the IE to scattered warehouses 60 miles from the rail. BIG is designed to pull that function out to a single rail-fed campus in the High Desert, 130 miles from the ports, and bind it to BNSF service by contract.

What it would take from the IE is the open question. Transload is one slice of the region's warehouse economy, not the bulk of it — most IE warehouse demand is storage, pick-and-pack, and regional distribution serving Southern California's population, none of which BIG touches. A large share of port transload also happens close to the harbor in the Gateway Cities, not out in the IE. So the volume genuinely exposed to a rail-locked Barstow campus may be modest, and BNSF has not broken out how much IE-based transload the project would absorb. The 9-million-square-foot figure is Barstow's capacity, not a measure of what leaves the IE.

For now the honest read is a defined competitor with an undefined bite: a Class I railroad would build a large block of transload warehouse space with a cost-and-speed structure it controls, aimed at freight some of which moves through the IE today. Construction would not begin until late 2026 or early 2027, and the warehouse center would fill gradually as tenants relocate. The number that tells an IE operator whether this matters — how much transload the region actually does, and how much is portable to rail — is the thing to pin down as the project develops.