A rock revetment damaged by high surf and storm surge was repaired this week along San Diego County’s only railroad connection to Los Angeles and the rest of the United States.
The revetment protects a section of tracks just north of Camp Pendleton below the Cyprus Shore community in San Clemente, where previously a slow-moving landslide carried the rails about 28 inches seaward in 2021 and 2022.
“The repairs along the coastal rail line in south San Clemente, in the same Cyprus Shore area where emergency work was completed in 2023, are a result of Metrolink’s track inspector identifying a small area (two sections each about 10 feet wide), where some existing riprap was displaced by recent storm surge, requiring replacement,” OCTA spokesman Eric Carpenter said Friday.
“There has been no (additional) track movement; these are only repairs to riprap to ensure the track remains stable,” Carpenter said.
“Even with the rain, crews were able to finish the repairs by working during nighttime hours on Wednesday and Thursday,” he said. “Rail service was not interrupted.”
No rain-related problems were reported on the 60-mile rail corridor operated by North County Transit District between downtown San Diego and the Orange County border.
“When heavy rainfall is predicted, all of our high-priority drainage is inspected and cleaned,” NCTD Chief of Staff Mary Dover said Friday. “During rain events we have track inspectors out monitoring for any issues and have detailed plans for our high-priority areas.”
One of those areas is a 1.7-mile section of tracks on the high coastal bluffs in Del Mar that faces erosion problems similar to those in San Clemente. The latest phase of stabilization efforts there, led by the San Diego Association of Governments, has been underway for months.
Unrelated to the work at Cyprus Shore in Orange County, crews continue to make improvements to the rail line north of the San Clemente Pier nearly 3 miles away.
That work includes the construction of a 1,400-foot-long catchment wall to protect the tracks, rebuilding a pedestrian path near the railway, and additional sand nourishment on the beach.
The rain has caused some minor delays for construction in that area but work continues and is on schedule to be completed next summer, Carpenter said.
Passenger train service was suspended through San Clemente from April 28 to June 7 this year for emergency work to safeguard the tracks from landslides and coastal erosion.
Bluff failures and landslides have caused five separate track closures at San Clemente since 2021. Together, the shutdowns amount to approximately one year of suspended passenger service.
That’s almost double the number of lengthy closures on the same stretch of tracks in the previous 130 years, according to an Orange County grand jury report released in June.
The grand jury report concluded that the OCTA responded adequately to the emergencies and recommended two things: that the agency find ways to add sand to the beach more quickly, and that it lobby state and federal agencies to make it easier and faster to get permits for maintenance work.