O.C. Rail Commuters Scramble for Alternative Ways Into L.A. : Transportation: Many who rely on Amtrak and OCTA service cope by turning to car-pools and buses instead.

Peeling off into car-pools, buses or motoring alone, Orange County commuters came through the first day of the nationwide rail strike Wednesday unscathed--almost.

Consider the case of two attorneys with the state attorney general’s office and an employee with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Instead of hopping on the train as usual, the three were forced to car-pool from north Orange County--a commute that took four times as long by freeway as by Amtrak.

“It was horrible,” said Ricardo Alciano of Fullerton, who relies on mass transit because he does not own a car. “I left for work 10 minutes earlier and arrived an hour later.”

Alciano’s group took a circuitous route--the Orange Freeway north to the Pomona Freeway, then to the San Gabriel River Freeway and the San Bernardino Freeway--all so they could ride into Los Angeles in the high-occupancy vehicle lanes where, attorney Penny Nagler said, “you can really zip.”

Scores of other commuters, business travelers and tourists found their own ways to cope up and down California as an off-again, on-again nationwide rail strike started and stuck early Wednesday, shutting down all but one passenger service in the state.

The greatest impact was on Amtrak’s popular San Diegan service, which carries about 5,500 commuters and others among Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

Long-distance and transcontinental Amtrak trains were canceled Tuesday in anticipation of the walkout. When the strike actually hit Wednesday, it targeted freight railroads but also forced Amtrak to shut down all of its trains that operate on the freight carriers’ tracks.

That ended service on the San Joaquin route from Oakland to Bakersfield and the new Capital Corridor line between San Jose and Sacramento.

The only passenger service still running in California on Wednesday was the San Jose-to-San Francisco Caltrain commuter service, which carries about 10,500 passengers a day. It is run by the Southern Pacific Railroad for the California Department of Transportation.

In Orange County, a few people did not get word of the strike and stood waiting--not to board the trains, but mostly to pick up train passengers who never arrived.

“I guess that means I’m not going to work,” grumbled Don Magnuson, a mortgage banker, who waited at the San Clemente depot for a 9 a.m. train to deliver his daughter from Fullerton. At 9:30, Magnuson knew something was amiss and drove not to work, but to north Orange County to get his daughter.

Each day, more than 160,000 Orange County residents commute to jobs in Los Angeles, of which an estimated 1,500 take the eight Amtrak trains that normally ply the rail corridor between San Diego and Union Station in Los Angeles.

The Orange County Transportation Authority has its own commuter train that makes one trip to Los Angeles in the morning and a return trip in the afternoon. It averages about 300 passengers per day. The commuter service, which began about 14 months ago, is affected by Amtrak’s labor problems because OCTA pays Amtrak to operate the train. It has an Amtrak crew.

But neither OCTA nor Amtrak enjoyed much sympathy from people adversely affected by the strike.

There was Brenda Hoogstraten of San Juan Capistrano, who waited to pick up a house maid who usually takes the train from Santa Ana. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Hoogstraten said. “There’s no way I can call her.”

And there was Robert Ross of San Juan Capistrano, one of 20 workers who regularly commute by Amtrak from south Orange County to Hughes Aircraft in Fullerton. He said the group was “very distressed” about the strike.

“Luckily,” he said, “we had already developed a plan to car-pool.” Ross and a colleague met at the San Juan Capistrano depot as they do every weekday morning, but this time they set out for Fullerton by car on the freeway. “The traffic, actually, was surprisingly light,” Ross said after he arrived in Fullerton.

For Jim Graham of San Clemente, the rail strike may mean moving back to his parents’ house in Placentia--at least temporarily. A 45-year-old auditor, Graham took refuge there Tuesday night to cut his commute time Wednesday morning.

“I went home, grabbed another suit and shirt and tie and got back in my car,” said Graham, who has been riding the commuter train for three years. “After tomorrow, I have to change suits, so I’ll be back in San Clemente.”

Richard Morley, a Fluor Daniel computer specialist under contract to Caltrans in Los Angeles, stood outside the train station in Santa Ana waiting for a special bus that was 40 minutes late.

“The train is the only way to go to L.A.,” Morley said. “I hate the freeways.”

Later, Morley traded his Amtrak pass for a Greyhound ticket, hoping to get to work by lunchtime.

Jerry Raber, a Greyhound bus driver, disputed the California Highway Patrol’s assessment that the rail strike did not worsen freeway congestion.

“It seems there are more commuters out there” driving to work, Raber said before leaving the Santa Ana depot with a load of train passengers headed for Los Angeles.

OCTA offered emergency bus service from train stops Wednesday and will do so again today, spokeswoman Mona Ziada said. Bus drivers will try to follow the train’s regular schedule. But the special buses from South County do not stop in Anaheim or Fullerton to drop off passengers making local trips within the county.

Buses will return from Union Station in Los Angeles at intervals from 4:45 p.m. until 5:40 p.m. Bus drivers will accept Amtrak and OCTA train passes; without a pass, the fare is $3 each way.

The transportation authority has regularly-scheduled bus service from the Fullerton Park & Ride and Huntington Center to Los Angeles. Both lines combined average 1,000 boardings a day.

On Wednesday, two special OCTA buses carried a total of 55 people from San Juan Capistrano to Los Angeles. Another 53 people boarded buses to Los Angeles at the Irvine station, and another 22 at Santa Ana.

“It went fine,” Ziada said. “We didn’t need as many buses as we thought we would.” Ziada said OCTA’s information center got only 70 calls by 10 a.m. Wednesday, even though it opened an hour early, at 5 a.m.

But travelers were not the only people affected by the strike. Reed Farr, who owns Capistrano Depot Travel, which sells Amtrak tickets at the station, griped about losing 95% of his business during a peak travel period.

Times staff writers Bob Elston, Len Hall, Mark Stein and Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this report.