34°53′35.5″N 117°04′28.6″W / 34.893194°N 117.074611°W
Barstow Yard is a classification yard operated by Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) in Barstow, California. With 48 directional tracks and a total area of approximately 600 acres (240 ha), it is the second largest classification yard west of the Rocky Mountains after the JR Davis Yard. Today, almost all freight traffic to and from Southern California runs through the junction.
Its beginnings date back to the construction of a southern transcontinental railroad connection by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF). At the end of the 19th century, the Mojave Desert had to be crossed, in which an important branch for traffic from the Midwest to San Francisco in the north and to Los Angeles and San Diego in the southwest was created at the site of today's Barstow. In the early 1970s, AT&SF expanded the railroad facilities into a large flat facility that stretches above the city for nearly 5 miles (8.0 km) along the Mojave River. In 1995, the AT&SF merged with the Burlington Northern Railroad (BN) to form the BNSF Railway. BNSF operates the transcontinental connection under the name Southern Transcon and, in 2019, employed around 1000 people at Barstow Yard.