Effort to Curb Southern California Rail Yard Pollution Stalls Under Trump
The region’s rail yards continue to pose serious health hazards, prompting local advocates to push state leaders for action.
The post Effort to Curb Southern California Rail Yard Pollution Stalls Under Trump appeared first on .
This story was supported by the Climate Equity Reporting Project and the Stakes Project at UC Berkeley School of Journalism.
When MaCarmen Gonzalez moved from Mexico to the city of San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles, two decades ago, she brought one of her two sons with her. Soon after, he began suffering from asthma, while the son who remained in Mexico stayed healthy. The contrast convinced Gonzalez that the air in her new community — which had become a major distribution hub for Amazon and other online retailers — was making people sick.
She began organizing with People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, a local environmental group, after seeing many of her friends fall ill with cancer — and in some cases — die from the disease. She attributed their illnesses to the unhealthy air.
Earlier this year, San Bernardino County — home to more than 2 million residents, the majority of whom are Latino — was ranked the nation’s worst for ozone pollution by the American Lung Association for the 15th consecutive year. “If you can’t leave, then you are stuck with the situation here, and you start to notice the health impacts building,” she said. “It often starts with allergies, and then it gets worse.”
Over the last several years, Gonzalez and other community members have rallied residents to protest and testify at local regulatory hearings, pressing for tougher oversight of what’s known as the logistics industry. Their movement gained momentum when local air regulators began drafting rules aimed at cutting pollution from warehouses and Southern California’s two massive ports.
MaCarmen Gonzalez with a group of environmental justice activists near the San Bernardino rail yard. Photo courtesy of People’s Collective for Environmental Justice.
Last summer, organizers won a major victory when the South Coast Air Quality Management District agreed to regulate rail yards, an often-overlooked but heavily polluting corner of the shipping industry. Health studies going back nearly two decades have found elevated cancer risk in communities near rail yards, including the BNSF Railway intermodal facility in San Bernardino, as well as reduced lung function in children going to school nearby. The pollution that trains, trucks and other vehicles generate in rail yards don’t only pose health risks to local residents, they’re also a significant source of climate-warming emissions.
But just as air regulators were preparing to crack down on the pollution coming from the 25 rail yards in the region, the effort hit a wall — a new presidential administration hostile to environmental regulation.
Consequently, the rule that the South Coast Air Quality Management District adopted last summer intended to make rail companies like BNSF and Union Pacific Railroad clean up their operations is now off the table. The rule would have required the companies to dramatically reduce the toxic emissions generated by their Southern California rail yards, make plans to add zero emissions infrastructure and replace some diesel-powered equipment with cleaner electric alternatives.
It was a blow to communities like San Bernardino, where pollution from goods movement has grown alongside the rise in e-commerce. It also threw a wrench in one of the region’s more promising strategies for addressing the persistent, interconnected problems of climate change and air pollution. And it’s just one of many ways communities could suffer under the Trump administration’s broad-based attack on environmental regulations. For now, local residents in San Bernardino are looking to state officials to rein in air pollution in their communities. But they face steep opposition from rail companies and industry lobbying groups.
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The Inland Empire, where Gonzalez lives, is a basin-shaped region that stretches east of Los Angeles County, and includes the cities of San Bernardino, Riverside and Ontario. The towering San Gabriel Mountains, which form the region’s backdrop, are often obscured by a layer of gray-brown haze laden with lung-damaging particulates and other pollutants that get trapped by the peaks and hang in the air.
The pandemic hastened the expansion of Southern California’s shipping industry, but the warehouses began to replace farms in the area as far back as the 1980s. Their proliferation has led to sprawl at a massive scale and has attracted over 600,000 trucks a day to the region. They transport everything from clothing and shoes to appliances and home goods from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Numerous studies have shown that living near transportation corridors is associated with higher rates of heart disease and cancer, adverse birth outcomes, negative effects on the immune system and neurotoxicity.
“It’s funny to think you could be going out to exercise, but you might actually be hurting yourself more than you’re helping,” said Gem Montes, another organizer with People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, who started a citizen science project focused on testing the air after realizing air pollution was hampering her ability to go outside. She worked with high school students who found high levels of air pollution in their school and homes.
Montes lives in Colton, known as the “hub city,” which is home to the Union Pacific West Colton yard, another major rail yard.
Rail yards are built to include dozens of parallel tracks used for storing, sorting, loading and unloading train cars and locomotives. They use retired diesel locomotives to move trains around the yards — engines that are more polluting than people typically see traveling around the state. And the trucks that park at the rail yards often idle for hours at a time.
And the pollution they generate is not just from their emissions. There is also noise. Residents living near rail yards hear the sound of metal gnashing against metal as freight trains pass by, moving products from warehouses to far-flung distribution centers. At all hours of the day, trucks loaded up with cargo rumble through Inland Empire communities, headed to nearby warehouses, including a 1-million-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center.
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The rules championed by environmental and community groups to curb emissions from rail yards and other polluters were part of a creative strategy employed by local air regulators in recent years to work around restrictions on regulating cars, trains and trucks, which typically cross state lines, placing them primarily under federal jurisdiction. These so-called indirect source rules allow local regulators to target emissions generated by trains and vehicles that are associated with stationary facilities — such as warehouses, sports stadiums or, in this case, rail yards — that attract significant traffic.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District’s first indirect source rule was aimed at cutting vehicle emissions directly connected to warehouses. It was adopted in 2021 and imposes environmental fees on warehouse owners, which they can offset by adding solar panels to their roofs, replacing diesel loading vehicles with electric ones, or providing chargers for electric trucks.
Then, last August, the AQMD adopted a similar rule for rail yards, and community members were cautiously optimistic.
The rule required BNSF and Union Pacific to cut smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution at all 25 rail yards in the region — an 82% reduction by 2037 — and mandated that the rail operators plan to build charging and other infrastructure to support zero-emission operations.
A row of shipping containers sit in a lot next to a San Bernardino neighborhood. Photo: Jeremy Lindenfeld.
It would have been an incremental step toward broader electrification of the rail industry in the state — and it would have paved the way for Union Pacific and BNSF to electrify their freight handling equipment and add charging infrastructure to the rail yards.
However, the rule was written to take effect only after the state passed two related laws aimed at cutting emissions in trucks and passenger trains. And the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the state regulator that partners with 35 regional air districts, withdrew both rules from the EPA process in January, shortly before Trump took office, in recognition that approval by the new administration was dead on arrival.
Two large railroad industry trade groups, the Association of American Railroads and the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association, had opposed the in-use Locomotive Regulation, which would have required train operators to begin transitioning their equipment to zero emissions. Both groups sued CARB in 2023 over the rule.
Neither BNSF nor Union Pacific responded to Capital & Main’s requests for comment.
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Now activists are hoping that the state can regulate the rail yard on its own — and state officials seem open to trying. This spring Rainbow Yeung, a spokesperson for AQMD, told Capital & Main that the agency was “continuing to discuss potential paths forward with CARB.”
In March, Assemblymember Robert Garcia introduced Assembly Bill 914, which would have affirmed CARB’s authority to oversee indirect sources. But after it was amended, he placed it on hold, effectively killing it for the year.
The nonprofit advocacy organization Earthjustice sponsored the bill alongside Garcia. Adrian Martinez, director of the organization’s Right To Zero campaign, says that the legislation will be reintroduced in early 2026.
A state-level rule targeting a range of “pollution magnets,” including rail yards, would be a novel step for California, which has been granted waivers by the EPA under both Republican and Democratic administrations that allow the state to go beyond federal air quality regulations. CARB listed the strategy in a recent set of recommendations to Gov. Gavin Newsom aimed at filling in the gaps left by the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the state’s climate policy.
“With our clean air standards under attack by the Trump administration, it’s vital that California brings more tools to the table to clear smog,” said Martinez.
The Supply Chain Federation, an industry lobbying group that fought against AB 914, has expressed concern about the potential shift toward a statewide rule targeting indirect pollution sources. The group “will continue to oppose similar proposals in the future,” said Sarah Wiltfong, chief public policy and advocacy officer for the federation in an email.
The Supply Chain Federation released a report in July calling AQMD’s warehouse indirect source rule “deeply flawed, economically harmful, and environmentally ineffective” and said it wants CARB’s other existing approaches to vehicle emissions standards to continue instead.
Andrea Vidaurre, co-founder of People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, feels optimistic about the potential for a state-level indirect source rule but added that it is not the only way forward.
“Rail yards are a huge source of air pollution, so if it’s not through [an indirect source rule], we’re asking what else California can do to make sure that it’s looking at [vehicle] idling limits, infrastructure upgrades, whatever it might need to do to have these places ready for [electric trains] — technology that exists everywhere else in the world but here.”
And while electrifying trains and trucks would go a long way toward reducing pollution and cutting greenhouse gases, Vidaurre and her fellow advocates say that the larger issue of consumption — how much and how we buy — is the elephant in the room.
Even last fall, when it seemed all but guaranteed that the region would take an incremental step toward cleaning up its rail yards, she said the new regulations wouldn’t be a silver bullet.
“The problem is that we’re concentrating everything in one community,” said Vidaurre. “Forty percent of the nation’s imports move through these two ports.” But even if trucks and trains get electrified, she added, we still need fewer of them on the road.
Copyright 2025 Capital & Main.
Maison Tran is a UC Berkeley California Local News Fellow.
