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Air Force utilizes MCLB Barstow railhead

US Marine Corps News

3/3/2011 By Lance Cpl. Sean Palmer , Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow

MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS BASE BARSTOW, Calif. — Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow maintains its service and support to the Marine Corps and abroad with a multitude of operations. One of the prominent ways MCLBB achieves this is with the use of its railhead. The U.S. Air Force took advantage of the efficiency and capabilities of the railhead recently by using it to load a Transporter Erector missile launcher for shipment across the country, Feb. 24.

Since 2005, the airmen from Vandenberg Air Force Base, located in Santa Barbara, Calif., have been coming to MCLBB to use the railhead for its convenience and effectiveness as way to transport important equipment.

“We have to come to Barstow to ship our TEs because the tracks are the only ones big enough to handle our equipment and it’s a much more efficient way to transport our launchers across country,” Air Force Master Sgt. Jeff Lynn said. Lynn is a missile maintenance technician with the missile maintenance crew attached to 1st Air Space Test Squadron at Vandenberg AFB.

The large missile systems are being transported to Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., which is operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The flight facility is nearly 3,000 miles away from Vandenberg AFB and by using the railway as a method of transport for the launchers, it saves the military money and time because the only other way to transport the TEs across country is to drive them across country by truck, explained Air Force Master Sgt. Todd Galford, missile maintenance technician.

“It only takes 30 days for these launchers to make it across country by train and if we didn’t make this date to ship our launchers it would have cost the Air Force a lot of money and time to transport them by truck, which would have been our only other alternative to using the railhead here,” Galford, a Cleveland native with 20 years of Air Force service, mentioned.

These specific launchers are used to launch satellites. However, these launchers do have the capabilities to launch Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles such as the LMG-30 Minuteman, which is a U.S. nuclear missile, explained Air Force Staff Sgt. Mathew Livesay.

The railhead service is provided by MCLBB to not only to the Air Force, but also to the Army on a regular basis. Keeping access to the railhead open to other branches of service contributes to the environment of jointness cultivated throughout the military.