Keeping the Commuter Rail Line on Track : Location of Depot in Del Mar Area Threatens Project

Thousands of North County rail commuters will be whizzing down the coast to jobs in San Diego by 1993, unless a determined two-square-mile roadblock named Del Mar derails the project before it gets rolling.

The $70-million commuter rail project is the brainchild of a group of local transit agencies. The aim is to ease freeway congestion by running high-speed commuter trains from Oceanside south to San Diego each morning and returning northbound each night on the same coastal railroad tracks used by Amtrak passenger trains.

Del Mar Councilwoman Brooke Eisenberg fired the first salvo in the battle over the commuter rail project by notifying North County Transit District officials that the county’s smallest city was not willing to host a regional transit center necessary for the mass-transit plan.

Parking Crunch

Amtrak trains are one thing, Eisenberg said. Del Mar’s venerable station--which features the best surf view of any depot on the West Coast--can handle the northbound Amtrak commuters who pay $5 a day to squeeze into the tiny depot parking lot. But to increase the pace with eight more commuter trains stopping by each weekday would never do.

Del Mar residents have difficulty now finding a parking place near the post office (which is around the corner from the depot) just to dash in and pick up their mail. What would it be like if the number of commuter cars doubled or tripled or, God forbid, sextupled?

San Diego Assn. of Governments’ analysts agreed that the pint-sized depot parking lot could never serve a regional transit center, so they set to work finding alternative sites that would serve both Amtrak and the future southbound commuter trains. Their final candidates, less scenic than the Del Mar station but more spacious, include two locations on the Del Mar Fairgrounds and one at Lomas Santa Fe Drive in Solana Beach.

The proposed Oceanside-to-San Diego commuter rail system requires a stop every four or five miles along the route, so a place must be found in the Solana Beach-Del Mar area where buses and autos and trains can mesh without creating gridlock, a Sandag analyst said.

But Eisenberg’s concerns go further than the daily parking lot melee at the Del Mar depot. If Del Mar can’t keep its quaint Amtrak station, she said, then the railroad should be run out of town. The tracks, she said, should be relocated off the fragile ocean bluffs that crumble a bit with the vibrations of every passing train.

Rerouting Is Pushed

Eisenberg and fellow Del Mar Councilwoman Jacqueline Winterer have joined forces in their effort to preserve the city’s oceanfront bluffs and to reroute the commuter railroad to the east, perhaps along Interstate 5 or east of it through North City West, on an alignment being considered for a future San Diego trolley route.

In December, 1940, the unstable Del Mar bluffs claimed a freight train. According to news accounts of the wreck, which killed a crewman, the sandy soil beneath the tracks shifted, sending the engine and a dozen cars over the edge

and onto the beach below.

Although there have been no serious train wrecks along the Del Mar bluffs since that accident nearly 50 years ago, Winterer has pictures showing the slow, and not so slow, erosion of the bluffs above and below the roadbed.

“To put another eight trains a day on the bluffs will only hasten the time when we have to do as other areas have done and build ugly concrete retaining walls over the bluffs. We have seen them other places and we don’t want them here in Del Mar,” Eisenberg said.

Detouring the railroad to the east around Del Mar also would open up alternatives for location of the regional transit center, she said.

At a North County Transit Board meeting last month, Eisenberg went public with her campaign. She told fellow directors that the city of Del Mar wants the railroad tracks removed from the Del Mar bluffs. The city might consider purchasing the right-of-way for open space once the tracks are relocated, she said.

Costly Proposition

Although Eisenberg’s demands went unchallenged by NCTD directors, staff members said that the plan won’t wash because the freeway grades are too steep for the type of engines in use along the line and because rerouting a railroad around Del Mar would cost about $200 million.

Paul Price, director of service development for NCTD, said that the transit district, in cooperation with the San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit Development Board, has hired a Washington consulting firm to sort out the legalities of acquiring or leasing Santa Fe trackage from Oceanside south to San Diego.

He doubts that Del Mar can buy its part of the railroad tracks, which could throw up a roadblock at midpoint on the commuter route, but said that the study will answer that question.

Studies confirm that the Del Mar rail route along the bluffs may be doomed from 10 to 100 years from now because of eroding soil, he said, “mandating relocation (of the tracks) some time in the future.”

Solana Beach also is balking at becoming a commuter stop. An alternate site would place the regional transit center at the beach city’s main intersection of Lomas Santa Fe Drive and Highway 101.

Solana Beach Councilwoman Margaret Schlesinger said that the proposed transit center alternative--one of three still in the running for the Del Mar-Solana Beach area--could be a blessing, not a bane to the community.

If the commuter rail project included lowering the railroad tracks below the busy intersection, the major traffic problem of conflicting train and auto traffic would be eliminated, she said.

But the lowering of the railroad 27 feet below the road surface, plus construction costs of the commuter rail stop, would cost $30 million--more than the project could bear.

“People are accusing us of running through another bullet train project,” Schlesinger said, “but that’s not the situation at all. If we could get the railroad undergrounded and improve the traffic flow, we would be much better off.” The bullet train proposal, which died a political death earlier in the decade, proposed running high-speed, nonstop trains along the coastal rail route at speeds of 200 m.p.h. and higher.

She and other council members will get feedback from Solana Beach citizens at a hearing Thursday evening. The council also has petitioned for a second look at the price of lowering the railroad tracks, which they believe is too high.

Other Station Sites

Two sites on the Del Mar Fairgrounds are being being considered to replace the Del Mar railroad station, but both have encountered opposition. One, a “piano-shaped” tract west of the race track brings furrows to the brow of Del Mar Thoroughbred Club general manager Joe Harper.

“We are cramped now in our operations, and horses and automobiles don’t mix well at all,” he said. For the 10 weeks when the thoroughbreds are in residence at the Del Mar track, it would be a “major concern” to have the turf and the surf separated by hundreds of harried commuters and their cars, he said. Environmentalists side with Harper, but for a different reason. A parking structure proposed for the site would trespass on sensitive wetlands in the San Dieguito River.

The second, and preferred, fairgrounds site abuts Via de la Valle at the northeastern edge of the fairgrounds, adjacent to the railroad tracks. It would cause less problems for the thoroughbreds and the wetlands, but would require a six-story structure down the bluffs to house commuters’ cars.

Nelda Smart, who has lived on the Via de la Valle site for years, opposes the option because it would mean the destruction of her home.

“No one else would be allowed to build a six-story building along the coast, but I guess the government can do pretty much as it wants,” Smart said.

Plans in Progress

Despite problems in locating a transit center in the Del Mar-Solana Beach area, the commuter rail project is well on the way and expected to be in operation by late 1992 or early in 1993.

Commuter rail stations are planned at Oceanside Transit Center, west of Hill Street; in Carlsbad at Grand Avenue and at Poinsettia Boulevard; at Encinitas Boulevard, in Sorrento Valley, Miramar, Old Town and at the Santa Fe station in downtown San Diego.

The diesel-powered, double-decker commuter trains will reach speeds of 90 m.p.h. on the 43-mile run from Oceanside to San Diego. Maximum one-way fare would be $3, or $80 for a monthly pass.

The $70 million project is being funded by a half-cent sales tax increase approved by county voters in November, 1987, for road and transit projects.

Daily ridership is expected to be about 3,000 when the line begins, rising to 4,600 round-trip riders within five years. The transit system is expected to ease congestion on the main north-south coastal artery, Interstate 5, which experiences periods of gridlock during morning and evening commuter hours.

A second phase of the commuter rail system will link Oceanside and Escondido, relieving auto traffic on the only North County east-west artery, California 78, between the two cities.