Rail yard and warehouse security in Commerce

Local and live

Beside BNSF's Hobart intermodal yard

Commerce was incorporated on January 28, 1960, six miles from downtown Los Angeles, and its backbone is still the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe main line that reached the area in 1887 - now BNSF's Hobart Yard, a 243-acre intermodal facility with 52,000 feet of production track, 30 cranes, 2,200 wheeled parking stalls and 1,475 stacking spaces that, together with its companion yard next door, BNSF says handles the largest volume of domestic intermodal freight of any location in the country. The Santa Ana Freeway (I-5) and the Long Beach Freeway (I-710) give the city its main road access, and industrial space now makes up about 82 percent of Commerce's commercial square footage, more than double the 39 percent national average, inside a city of just 6.53 square miles and 12,378 residents. Alongside neighbouring Santa Fe Springs, Industry and Vernon, Commerce is part of a cluster that covers 0.69 percent of Los Angeles County's land yet carries more than 24 percent of its industrial square footage.

Commerce's rail yards and warehouse rows can also make a convenient place to dump evidence. Investigators probing a string of Camarillo-area trailer thefts between December 2024 and January 2025 - an initial loss topping $500,000 - eventually traced the stripped-down trailers to two drop points nearly 150 miles apart: one in Commerce, the other by the Otay Mesa border crossing, pointing the case toward Tijuana. Four suspects tied to fencing operations in South Gate and San Diego faced charges including grand theft of cargo. For a yard in Commerce, the same anonymity that comes from sitting near a major rail yard and several freeways cuts both ways: good for business, and good cover for anyone trying to get rid of a stolen trailer.

Next to a facility handling the volume Hobart Yard does, a Commerce warehouse or trailer yard needs more than a camera that just records footage nobody watches until the morning after. Sigma's live agents watch every camera 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and AI person and vehicle detection flags anyone moving through a dock door or trailer row once the last truck leaves. The agent checks the video, gives a live, instant talk-down through the site's speakers and escalates to police and your contacts, while Yard Operations keeps a running record of truck and trailer damage, visual seal checks on video and parking positions.

Also covering Vernon, Los Angeles, Montebello, Bell, Huntington Park, Maywood, East Los Angeles, Pico Rivera.