North County Plots Return of ‘Iron Horse’ to Ease 78 Gridlock

Travel back to yesteryear when the “iron horse” was the way to go and the Toonerville Trolley wasn’t a joke. In those turn-of-the-century days, a railroad spur meandered eastward from Oceanside, through Loma Alta, Vista, Buena, San Marcos and Richland to Rancho Rincon del Diablo, now the city of Escondido.

That railroad, which now carries only a single slow freight train on Monday, Wednesday and Friday round trips, bustled with excursion trains for prospective settlers in the late 1880s and 1890s and was bankrolled by opportunistic land sales firms selling plots in the inland valleys of North County.

Later, it became the “Grapevine Flyer,” ferrying commuters from inland to the coast and back for a bargain rate of 35 cents one way.

By the 1920s, when Escondido and Oceanside were growing towns of about 2,000 inhabitants each, the “Flyer” made a daily trip, leaving Escondido at 8:20 a.m. and returning there at 7:45 p.m.

But, by 1945, service had ebbed to a single coach at the end of a freight train and that year was the last for passenger service on the 22.3-mile line. The automobile had become the conveyance of choice for Southern Californians.

New Surge for Service

Now, 100 years after the Escondido-Oceanside line first opened on July 4, 1887, there is a groundswell of activity aimed at bringing the “good old days” of passenger rail service back, hopefully in time to put on excursion trains for the planned celebrations in mid-1988 for the 100th anniversaries of the two cities.

Even if the centennial nostalgia trips don’t materialize, a more serious effort to revive rail passenger service on the line is likely to succeed. Directors of the North County Transit District have authorized General Manager Dick Fifer to initiate talks with the Santa Fe Railway, owner of the rail spur, with an eye to acquiring the tracks and starting up commuter service again.

That rustic spur with its weed-grown track may soon provide frustrated drivers with a relaxing alternative to the traffic jams on California 78--North County’s only east-west freeway--by offering regular commuter service between the region’s major cities.

Billion Dollar Dream

And, even farther down the line, the insignificant spur line is scheduled to become an integral link in the 103-mile trolley network linking all of San Diego County’s cities, from San Ysidro to Santee, Escondido to El Cajon. That system, however, is a billion dollars and several decades away.

Fifer began the task of acquiring the Escondido-Oceanside line from Santa Fe with an exploratory letter to regional Santa Fe officials in Los Angeles. The response was silence. Santa Fe spokesman Mike Martin said, however, that, in this case at least, the lack of response does not mean a lack of interest in the NCTD proposal.

The rail giant is in the process of trying

to follow Interstate Commerce Commission orders to divorce itself from Southern Pacific, Martin said. He predicted that in another six weeks or so, Santa Fe will be ready to sit down and talk about the spur line sale.

Unprofitable Spur

The trend in the railroad industry is to sell off unprofitable spur routes to short-line rail operators who can provide freight service at a lower cost than Santa Fe, Martin conceded, and a recent study of railroad service in the San Diego-Los Angeles coastal corridor recommends that ownership of railroad trackage should be in the hands of governmental agencies.

Santa Fe just might be in the mood to go with the flow, he said, “and, at any rate, I am sure we are more than willing to discuss the matter.”

Rail commuter service along the California 78 corridor has been on the agenda of North County Transit for well over a decade, Fifer said. Traffic on 78 has increased at an even greater rate than North County’s runaway population growth, adding to the incentive to develop the rail spur into a commuter run.

San Diego Assn. of Governments transportation planners are finishing up a study of the 78 corridor, and the figures bear out what any North County driver already knows. Present daily traffic volumes on the east-west highway reach 97,000 on the stretch nearing Oceanside. By the year 2005, daily traffic volumes are predicted to reach 120,000--50% above the 80,000 average daily traffic that Sandag planners label as the maximum for “comfortable” travel on the route.

Estimates now in the works make these 78 traffic projections look “conservative,” planners said.

So, with each daily traffic snarl the prospects of a commuter rail service operating at 15- to 20-minute intervals between Escondido and Oceanside look sweeter.

Transportation consultant Byron Nordberg estimates that the line could provide 45- to 50-minute service between the two sites and could operate without major subsidies if it carried 9,000 paying customers each day.

Excursion Trains

As for the condition of the spur, Nordberg admits that it isn’t ready for a bullet train run. In its present condition, it could handle only such slow-moving excursion trains as those sought by the Escondido and Oceanside centennial celebration planners. There are no major physical roadblocks to bringing the spur up to rail commuter standards, he said, but it would probably take a couple of years and around $50 million.

Nordberg, a railroad buff, can see the definite pluses to bringing back the Grapevine Flyer: Alleviation of the incredible traffic jam around Palomar Community College in San Marcos; possible extension of the line south to Escondido’s North County Fair regional shopping center, and creation of a vital link in what some day will become an efficient suburban rail commuter network. The politics, the money matters, he leaves to others, confident that there will be a “positive resolution” to the situation by early next year.

Fifer admits that NCTD doesn’t have a bankroll that would allow the bus company to buy a railroad outright, but he isn’t too concerned about where the money will come from.

State and federal grants, coaxed by seed money from traffic-clogged cities along the California 78 corridor, are a beginning and the November ballot contains a countywide half-cent sales tax measure for transportation which, during its 20-year lifetime, would produce about $2.25 billion, including $130 million for 65 miles of commuter rail line from downtown San Diego to Oceanside, and from Oceanside to Escondido.

“It looks like this is a project whose time has finally come,” Fifer said. “It’s up to us to make it happen before traffic gets even worse. We must, at the very least, preserve the railroad right-of-way now so we can plan for the future.”