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Business View Magazine
Pacific Harbor Line
The “first and last mile” in global commerce
Pacific Harbor Line (PHL) is a short line railroad that pro-
vides rail transportation, maintenance, and dispatching
services to the adjoining Ports of Long Beach and Los An-
geles, California, which, together, comprise over 10,000
acres of land and 68 miles of waterfront along Southern
California’s San Pedro Bay. They are the two largest and
busiest container ports in the United States.
PHL was created in 1998, by its parent company, Ana-
costia Rail Holdings (ARH), a transportation develop-
ment and consulting firm that owns and develops short
line railroads and related transportation and logistics
companies. Otis Cliatt, the President of PHL, explains its
genesis: “PHL was created to assist the ports of L.A. and
Long Beach in expediting traffic from the port going west,
and from the eastward, inbound cuts, coming into the
port. The port was serviced by the Union Pacific (UP) and
Burlington-Northern-Santa Fe (BNSF) railroads, and also
the Southern Pacific (SP), prior to the UPSP merger. The
old Harbor Belt railroad line was disbanded and Pacific
