The talk has always been about moving the railroad off the crumbling Del Mar bluffs and building a new set of tracks further inland that wouldn’t be at the mercy of the eroding coastline.
Turns out the existing line isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. That raises questions about the practicality and continued costs of shoring up the imperiled route, the only line that connects San Diego with the rest of the nation.
North County Transit District Chief Executive Officer Shawn Donaghy brought up the rarely talked about topic at a recent meeting of the San Diego Association of Governments, which is the lead agency for the relocation project.
“That alignment … on the bluff will always remain active until the federal government decides either the military doesn’t have a use for it, (and) freight or passengers don’t have a use for it,” Donaghy told the Board of Directors.
Encinitas Mayor Bruce Ehlers, one of the newest members of the SANDAG board, said Friday he was surprised to hear that the roughly 1.6 miles of tracks on the bluffs could remain there indefinitely.
“I was under the assumption we were moving it off, which meant one route, in one place,” Ehlers said. “If you are going to have to armor the bluff regardless, that changes the decision completely. It doesn’t make sense.”
NCTD owns the 60 miles of track from the Santa Fe Station in downtown San Diego to the Orange County line and operates the Coaster commuter train between Oceanside and San Diego. It also has long-standing contracts that allow Amtrak, BNSF Railway and the Department of Defense to use the tracks, making the railroad what’s called a “common carrier.”
Two federal agencies — the Federal Railroad Administration and the Surface Transportation Board — would have to approve the closure of the bluff-top route, Donaghy said Tuesday in emailed answers to questions. That decision would come only after an application by NCTD and with the support of the Defense Department, Amtrak, BNSF Freight, and any other rail users.
“It would be difficult for us to support any removal of the current line without a full understanding of the project selected to move forward, including any potential litigation that may augment or adjust such decision,” Donaghy said.
“In the case of our partners at BNSF and Amtrak, they will want to see those plans and assurance on operating capacity as well,” he said.
An application to remove the old rail line “would likely not be approved by any federal partners until the new line is built, tested and there is confidence that redundancy is not needed,” Donaghy said.
“Each is case by case basis – and in our case, the uniqueness of having BNSF, Amtrak, and DOD as responsible tenants in that decision matrix would likely extend the timing of such requests,” he said.
Some United States rail corridors have been discontinued, he noted. However, the Del Mar one is different because of its multiple uses and agreements.
SANDAG has said for several years that 2035 was the earliest an alternate route with a tunnel could be completed. However, Del Mar residents and others opposed to a tunnel, the only option for an inland train route, have raised questions that prolonged preliminary studies and a possible completion date.
Del Mar elected officials have backed away from advocating a specific route for the tunnel. Their concerns include noise, vibrations, pollution, property values and the likely use of eminent domain.
“If the reality of the situation is that the track is going to stay on the bluff for a long time, there is plenty of time to figure out the best and least impactful route for an alternative alignment,” said Angelina Neglia, a Del Mar resident and member of the local Coalition for Safer Trains.
“Taxpayers are unlikely to pay for continued stabilization of the bluffs to accommodate BNSF after a new route is built,” Neglia said in an email Wednesday.
“There are many instances of tracks being converted to trails in the U.S., so permissions from various agencies is obviously obtainable with a good faith effort by NCTD and SANDAG,” she said. “One would hope they would not attempt to have two sets of tracks at taxpayer expense.”
Mayor Terry Gaasterland excused herself from the recent SANDAG discussion to avoid any possible conflict of interest.
At a Del Mar City Council meeting Monday, Gaasterland asked city staffers to look into how NCTD’s contracts with carriers might keep the tracks on the bluffs. The city previously took SANDAG to court and won, halting plans to build a safety fence along the railroad right-of-way.
Del Mar Councilmember Dan Quirk has long opposed any alternate train route. Quirk says the railroad is obsolete and that the entire corridor from San Diego to Orange County should be abandoned and replaced with a public park.
“This project will never, ever get built,” Quirk said at the council meeting. “It’s $5 billion. No one rides the train … all this time we’re spending, it’s a huge waste of time.”
Despite Quirk’s claim, transit district records show people do ride the train.
The Coaster stops at eight stations on its north-south route between Oceanside and the Santa Fe Depot in downtown San Diego.
It had 852,993 boardings in the last fiscal year, a 5% increase over fiscal 2022-23. The route is on the 351-mile Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo, or LOSSAN, corridor also used by Amtrak passenger trains and BNSF freight. It’s also part of the Defense Department’s national Strategic Rail Corridor Network that serves military installations such as Camp Pendleton in North County and the naval bases in San Diego.
Further fogging the future for any Del Mar tunnel is the new presidential administration’s stance on federal funding.
Chances for a large federal grant to fund a tunnel’s construction, expected to cost $5 billion or more, appear unlikely in the next four years. Much of the preliminary planning so far for an alternate route through Del Mar has been covered by a $300 million state grant SANDAG obtained in 2022.
Transit officials say it is essential to move the tracks in Del Mar.
Studies show the 60-foot-tall bluffs erode at the average rate of 6 inches annually. However, the cliffs don’t just creep 6 inches closer to the tracks each year. When they collapse, it happens quickly. A landslide can take a wide swath of earth, threatening the railroad and stopping trains until inspections and perhaps repairs are completed.
Del Mar’s coastal bluffs have long been threatened by erosion. A freight train headed for Los Angeles derailed on unstable tracks and fell to the beach on a rainy New Year’s Eve in 1940, killing three crew members.
SANDAG has spent tens of millions of dollars to stabilize the bluffs over the past 25 years. The ongoing effort largely involves installing drainage improvements, building seawalls and retaining walls, and sinking pilings of concrete and steel deep into the bedrock.
The costs of stabilization, as with any construction, have increased. One of the earlier phases of work was completed in 2016 for $3.7 million. Another phase in 2020 cost about $6.8 million.
Emergency measures required by a bluff collapse after a series of winter storms in February 2022 were completed for about $10.5 million, SANDAG said. That work included the installation of 18 additional concrete-and-steel columns called “soldier piles” sunk up to 60 feet deep into the upper bluff.
A draft budget released by the agency in 2024 included about $23 million for bluff stabilization through fiscal 2025 for the fifth phase of stabilization work, now underway. More work in the years ahead is expected to bring the total additional cost to more than $80 million through 2033.
Together, the efforts are intended to keep the tracks safe on the bluffs until at least 2035.
Despite all the work, there is only room for a single set of tracks on the bluffs, which increases the need for an alternate route.
So far, NCTD and SANDAG have added a second set of tracks to more than three-quarters of the 60-mile corridor between downtown San Diego and the Orange County border. The remaining sections of single track create bottlenecks that slow trains and delay service.
Without an alternate route, more bluff stabilization will be needed, even though many Del Mar residents, nonprofits such as the Surfrider Foundation, and the California Coastal Commission generally oppose seawalls and other hard structures that have negative environmental effects and limit access to the beach.
The idea of moving the tracks off the bluff into a tunnel has been around for many years.
A 1983 article in the San Diego Union newspaper, before it became the Union-Tribune, describes a rally against a proposed high-speed train that took place “on a sandy shoulder of Carmel Valley Road, adjacent to a high bluff that the project may use as a tunnel portal to take the tracks under Del Mar.”
A 1999 story in the Union-Tribune said a train tunnel in Del Mar was among several long-term projects being considered by NCTD at the time.
“We’re fooling ourselves if we think we can run the railroad on the bluff edge for years and years to come,” said Joe Kellejian, a Solana Beach council member and transit board director in 1999.
The tunnel would help with plans to expand Coaster service from the current nine round-trips daily to 24 daily and cut the travel time between Oceanside and San Diego from 60 to 50 minutes, the story said.
Today, the Coaster makes 15 round trips Monday through Thursday and 16 on Friday, with less service on weekends.
