Passenger rail service between San Diego and Orange County will remain unavailable for several more days or longer, a transit official said Friday.
A new landslide destroyed the Mariposa Bridge on a pedestrian trail in San Clemente on Wednesday, sending debris and parts of the bridge onto the railroad tracks. Trains have been unable to cross the site since then.
Work crews used a crane on a flatbed train car to remove two sections of the bridge Thursday night and take them away for disposal, said Scott Johnson, director of communications for Metrolink, the multi-county commuter rail service.
“At this point, officials from Metrolink, the OCTA (Orange County Transportation Agency) and private property landowners are all working to determine a course of action to remove soil and implement grading to assure that no additional debris falls onto the right-of-way,” Johnson said Friday.
“There is still no set timeline for when passenger rail service will return,” he said.
Officials from BNSF Railway, the region’s freight carrier, will determine when commercial freight service might resume, Johnson said.
“They are sending out their team to determine whether they want to accept the risk of operating freight through that area,” he said.
The San Diego-Orange County rail segment is part of the 351-mile Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo, or LOSSAN, rail corridor. It is San Diego’s only railway link with Los Angeles and the rest of the United States.
During previous closures at other San Clemente slides, freight service continued through the work areas at slow speeds and at night while passenger service remained suspended.
The Mariposa pedestrian bridge ran parallel to the tracks on part of a 2.3-mile, city-maintained trail along the base of a steep, unstable bluff from one section of beach to another. Most of the bluff where the slide occurred is private property.
Some of the officials at a news conference held Thursday in San Clemente were optimistic that train service would be restored soon. The news event was originally scheduled to announce funding for rail corridor improvements, but the focus quickly turned to the previous day’s landslide.
“Hopefully, within the next couple of days, we’ll have the trains running again,” said San Clemente City Councilmember Rick Loeffler, but others were less hopeful.
“I don’t want anyone to think that this is going to happen in the next day or two,” said Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley. “That’s not what I’ve been told … we don’t know. It is uncertain how long this will take.”
The Mariposa Bridge slide could be more difficult to repair than the Casa Romantica slide, which was on city property and so far has cost San Clemente about $8 million.
“In this case, the landslide is coming from private property, which we have no control over,” said San Clemente Councilmember Chris Duncan.
“Also, the slope (at the bridge) is more severe,” Duncan said. “It’s almost straight down. The landslide is going to be more powerful, and there’s less room to build some kind of wall or structure.”
Removal of the bridge will probably make the slope more unstable, he said, and there is “a huge pinnacle of dirt” above the tracks ready to fall that will have to be removed. Recent heavy rain may have triggered the slide, and more rain is expected next week.
An earlier landslide closed the Mariposa Bridge for several days in December, although train traffic continued at the time. Money the city had budgeted for a replacement bridge was diverted for last year’s Casa Romantica repairs.
The slide is the third in recent years to stop trains at San Clemente. Before the Casa Romantica slide, there was a slow, recurring one at the Cyrus Shore community, at the southern end of San Clemente near San Onofre State Beach.
The repeated closures at San Clemente have drawn some of the attention away from another trouble spot — the 1.7 miles of tracks on the crumbling seaside bluffs at Del Mar, near San Diego.
Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on a series of projects over more than 20 years to stabilize the Del Mar bluffs. A new phase of work beginning this year will cost $78 million, with funding from federal, state and local sources.
The San Diego Association of Governments received $300 million in state funding in 2022 to advance plans for a new route to take trains off the Del Mar bluffs and through a tunnel to be drilled beneath the city.
The proposed tunnel project would cost more than $4 billion and could not be completed before at least 2035.
North County Transit District’s Coaster and Sprinter trains are not affected by the San Clemente suspension. Metrolink trains, which normally come as far south as Oceanside, will only go as far as San Juan Capistrano on the weekend and to the Laguna Niguel/Mission Viejo station during weekdays.
Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner will not run between Oceanside and Irvine. Some Pacific Surfliner runs will have a bus link to take passengers between the Oceanside and Irvine stations.
State Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, chaired a Senate subcommittee that held three hearings on railroad issues last year. This month, the subcommittee encouraged CalSTA to take a stronger role in managing the rail corridor, which passes through six counties.
A spokesman for the California State Transportation Agency, or CalSTA, said Friday that the agency will work closely with teams responding to the latest landslide.
“CalSTA will lend state support in any way possible to safely and quickly reopen the impacted section,” said agency spokesman Marty Greenstein in an email.
“CalSTA is providing leadership to establish a unified focus for corridor-wide coordination,” he said.
