Council OKs $5 Million for Depot in Chatsworth : Transportation: Commuter rail service to downtown could begin by the end of 1992. The action lays the groundwork for a large transit hub.

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to appropriate $5 million to help build a train station in Chatsworth, ensuring that a downtown commuter rail service will stop there and laying the groundwork for a large transportation hub.

The council’s action provides the city’s share of the $17-million cost of buying a 13-acre site from the Southern Pacific railroad and building a station there in partnership with the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. The site is west of Canoga Avenue between Devonshire and Lassen streets.

Commuter service could begin at Chatsworth as early as the end of next year, said Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents the area. The county commission made service to Chatsworth contingent on the city sharing the cost of the station.

Bernson has been a key supporter of a proposal to use the station as the first stage of a super transit hub, where connections could be made among buses, cars, bicycles, commuter vans, trains and ultimately perhaps even a trolley-style light-rail line.

Chatsworth residents who supported the train station as an alternative to a lumberyard, which they feared would generate too much truck traffic, greeted the council’s action with measured enthusiasm. Susan Amerikaner, a spokeswoman for a citizens group formed to help design the station, said she is worried that the project could become too large and too busy.

“We have a very clear vision of what we hope will be a community transportation center, not a super transportation center,” Amerikaner said. “In the back of our minds is the question: Are we going to be exchanging 70 lumber trucks a day for something worse?”

Commuter rail trains are to run along existing freight tracks under a sweeping 1990 lease and purchase agreement between the Transportation Commission and Southern Pacific, involving 177 miles of railroad rights of way. The passenger cars will resemble Amtrak cars and will be pulled by diesel-powered locomotives.

One terminus of the commuter route will be Union Station downtown. The route will split in Burbank. One line will continue through Chatsworth to Moorpark in Ventura County, and the other will climb to Saugus in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Another line is to travel through the San Gabriel Valley to San Bernardino.

Both the council and the county commission had already agreed to pay the remaining $12 million of the station’s cost from county and state transit funds, and hope to recoup the cost of buying, developing and maintaining the station by leasing portions of the property to commercial developers.

A 10-member citizens committee is developing a plan for the land, looking at uses such as a large parking lot or structure, a day-care center, a dry cleaner, a grocery and a restaurant--”the kinds of things you’d want to see when you get off the train,” Bernson said.

The committee also has indicated interest in designing the station to resemble the Old West-style Chatsworth train depot, demolished in 1962.

The Transportation Commission has projected that the station could open by the end of 1992, although Bernson said Wednesday it might initially consist only of a simple platform and parking.

Southern Pacific had planned to turn the Chatsworth property into a lumber transfer yard, a proposal that disturbed nearby homeowners and parents whose children attended Chatsworth Park Elementary School four blocks away. Bernson stymied the plans by engineering a moratorium on industrial development in the area.