This Friday, Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner is suspending all service indefinitely between Irvine and San Diego for emergency repairs in San Clemente. The year’s heavy rains and high surf severely impacted the track, which runs on the coastline.
“The coast has been eroding for decades, so where you used to have sand way out there, now the waves are actually starting to shift the rails themself, that constitute the connection between San Clemente and Oceanside,” says LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano.
He adds, “There is no consumer train connection right now between Orange County and San Diego County. I mean, what Amtrak is doing is they're gonna start getting buses from the Irvine station and then busing you over to Oceanside, and then from Oceanside you can continue the rest of the journey. … They’re like, ‘Yeah we don’t know how long this will last because we need to shore up’ — pardon the pun — ‘the eroding shore that is threatening the rail line itself.’”
He points out that this erosion has been happening for decades, and fixing the rail line will be a massive engineering project.
“The only thing that OCTA [Orange County Transportation Authority] might be able to do is be like ‘King Canute’ and tell the waves to stop. That's not going to happen though. So obviously, this is going to be a multi-agency effort because you can't have this railroad line — that also by the way, carries freight. … Right now it just disrupts commuters, and of course, that's very, very important. But once you start [affecting] these companies that are transporting freight, that's a whole other issue.”