Slide Severs Santa Barbara County Rail Route

A landslide along the coast that left a 300-foot section of track hanging without support means that no trains will roll through Santa Barbara County for at least a week.

Hundreds of tons of earth and rock suddenly slid down the hillside Sunday night, pushing a railway signal and fiber-optic lines as much as 30 feet toward the beach.

Five Amtrak trains normally travel the line through the county each day. Amtrak is busing passengers on its Coast Starlight and Pacific Surfliner trains between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.

The four to six freight trains that rumble through the county each day are being rerouted through the Tehachapis into the Central Valley. Those trains carry goods between Los Angeles and Oakland and San Francisco.

Union Pacific, which owns the track, said its engineers are trying to determine what triggered the slide 26 miles west of Santa Barbara.

“It certainly is a major occurrence,” Union Pacific spokesman Mike Furtney said. “There’s just no way at this point to predict how long it will take to repair it.”

Adjacent U.S. 101 did not appear threatened by the slide, although there were large cracks in the earth within 20 feet of the southbound lanes.

“It doesn’t look like it affects the highway,” said Jenny Linzner of the California Department of Transportation.

The first to feel the effects of the damage were customers of AT&T;, but the service disruption lasted only a few minutes. The slide pushed underground conduits carrying fiber-optic cables for AT&T;, MCI, Sprint and Quest downhill and stretched them, snapping the AT&T; line.