SAN DIEGO — Transportation officials in San Diego are studying what it would take to revive operations on a long-dormant 70-mile segment of the former San Diego & Arizona Eastern Railway to provide a direct freight link from San Diego to eastern markets, bypassing Los Angeles, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
The so-called Desert Line between Tecate, Mexico, and Plaster City, Calif., is owned by the San Diego Metropolitan Transportation System. It has been leased to a number of private operators over the past two decades but has seen little actual traffic, in part because of the costs of work needed to repair the route’s 57 bridges and 17 tunnels.
Metropolitan Transportation System CEO Sharon Cooney told the Union-Tribune the “numbers are staggering” regarding what is needed to fix the route, but California Department of Transportation officials for the San Diego area have begun a study to try to determine an exact price. The last leaseholder, Baja California Rail, had planned to spend about $60 million on the route, but the cost could be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. A Caltrans estimate could guide future leaseholders or set the stage for pursuing money from the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“We don’t want to put public transportation dollars into bringing it up to speed,” Cooney told the Union-Tribune, “but if there are freight-dedicated pots of money that could make it financially feasible, then sure.”
Would it be cheaper to just build new? San Diego – Pheonix is a top passenger corridor – for autos and air.
Quaint and scenic, former home of small Espee steam, Baldwin AS-616’s, and carload freight trains of modest length, the SD&AE was a wonderful railroad for railfans, a headache for Southern Pacific, and was never a big winner. Time has passed it by, and the cost to modernize it would far exceed the benefit. Ms. Cooney’s statement that, “We don’t want to put public transportation dollars into bringing it up to speed, but if there are freight-dedicated pots of money that could make it financially feasible, then sure,” says it all . . . If it can be done with somebody else’s “free” (read: tax) money, then Metropolitan Transportation System is all for it.
That route would take a major if not monumental rebuild to make it useful, there are lots of photos of the route on the railpictures dot net website. I would bet the costs would be 10s of millions of dollars per mile, just the big wood timber bride in one of the canyons would cost a fortune to replace, not to mention the curves that would probably not be compatible with modern freight cars. A pipe dream I would think.
The Carrizo Gorge part of the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway is like a dream layout from crazy model railroader, if they’re serious about running container trains and such from the Port of San Diego, a cut-off might be a good idea, at the cost of billions and billions. Lots of video on YouTube of people hiking and rail carting along the old line.
Is there enough yard trackage at both sides of border to handle potential traffic? Is the freight time window long enough to allow for all possible traffic ? How costly to allow for double stacks ( plate “H” ) ? How unstable is land to cause future outages after a rebuild ?