SAN DIEGO — The interruption of passenger service between South Orange County and Oceanside, Calif, could last for two months, an official with San Diego’s planning agency told broadcaster KPBS.
Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner and LA-area commuter operator Metrolink halted service through San Clemente, Calif., on Friday, over concerns about erosion along a portion of the coastal rail line used by both services, as well as BNSF freight trains.
“Service for passengers will stop for at least 60 days. Period,” said Hasan Ikhrata, CEO of the San Diego Association of Governments, after a conversation with Metrolink CEO Darren Kettle, according to the public broadcaster. “The freight service will continue to operate and the freight trains will move at a slower speed.”
Metrolink spokesman Scott Johnson told the San Diego Union Tribune that the agency “has placed more than 20,000 tons of rocks and boulders to secure the right of way. … We are working with our partners at OCTA [the Orange County Transportation Authority] and LOSSAN [the agency which operates the Pacific Surfliners] on additional mitigations.”
The same stretch of track in the San Clemente area, which has been described as the site of an “ancient landslide,” also was responsible for a halt to passenger service for more than two weeks last year. LOSSAN is running a bus bridge around the area of the interruption for Surfliner passnegers, while Metrolink is not offering alternative transportation for passengers south of its Laguna Niguel/Mission Viejo station [see “Pacific Surfliner, Metrolink halt operations …,” Trains News Wire, Sept. 30, 2022].
SANDAG has long dealt with a similar problem on another portion of the former Santa Fe Surf Line, which it owns south of Oceanside. It has undertaken a series of stabilization projects to slow erosion along the Del Mar Bluffs. There are long-term plans to move that segment of the route to an inland tunnel, but that project is estimated to cost up to $4 billion and will not be complete before 2035 [see “San Diego planning agency accepts funds for Del Mar tunnel project,” News Wire, Sept. 12, 2022].
“You can patch and stabilize as much as you want, and you can fight nature, but nature will win at the end of the day,” Ikhrata told KPBS. “That is why we shouldn’t waste any more money in patching, but work hard to move this track off the bluff.”
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