A regional transportation plan launched by the San Diego Affiliation of Governments may convey new consideration to an outdated concept — opening a prepare station on Camp Pendleton.
One of many long-term targets in SANDAG’s draft 2025 regional plan is to increase the Coaster commuter line from downtown San Diego previous its northernmost cease on the Oceanside Transit Middle to a platform on the Marine Corps base.
SANDAG’s regional plan, like a metropolis’s common plan, is taken into account a blueprint for tasks, targets and insurance policies over the subsequent 20 years. The company evaluations its regional plan about each 5 years. A closing 2025 plan is predicted to be adopted by the SANDAG board in December.
North County Transit District’s board of administrators reviewed the proposal for a Camp Pendleton prepare station not less than as early as 2011, when it permitted spending as much as $334,000 on preliminary work to set the venture in movement.
“We’re excited to have the prospect to serve North County’s largest employer,” then-NCTD Chief Administrative Officer Alex Z. Wiggins mentioned nearly 15 years in the past. Camp Pendleton has about 40,000 active-duty Marines and sailors, together with not less than a further 30,000 civilian staff and relations.
The most certainly location for the station was Stuart Mesa, the place NCTD has a Coaster upkeep yard about two miles north of the Oceanside Transit Middle.
The Stuart Mesa website is close to a focus of base housing, a $500 million naval hospital that opened in 2014, and a big navy commissary promoting groceries and division retailer objects.
Transit officers mentioned then the station may very well be inbuilt as little as 4 years, although no estimate was launched for building prices.
Along with Coaster commuter trains, the bottom station may serve Amtrak and Metrolink trains. Metrolink, which covers components of six Southern California counties, makes its southernmost cease in Oceanside.
The thought gave the impression to be on monitor in late 2013, when then-San Diego County Supervisor Invoice Horn, who was additionally an NCTD board member on the time, mentioned he had obtained a letter from the Pentagon granting “conceptual approval” of the Camp Pendleton station.
The letter from Maj. Gen. J.G. Ayala, of the Marine Corps Installations Command, mentioned the station could be of “important profit” to personnel at Camp Pendleton and in close by communities, based on an archived information story.
Base personnel even have the added incentive of Protection Division transportation subsidies for using the prepare, transit officers mentioned.
Nevertheless, the proposal has made little headway because the preliminary research. A SANDAG spokesperson mentioned Wednesday that NCTD is the lead company for the venture, and that any replace on its progress ought to come from them.
“NCTD commissioned a planning research and conceptual engineering of a possible rail station on Camp Pendleton close to the Stuart Mesa Upkeep Facility in 2011,” mentioned Mary Dover, the company’s chief of workers, on Wednesday.
“NCTD has not been capable of safe funding to advance the venture previous this level and bumped into some safety points with base entry,” Dover mentioned.
Any improvement alongside the coastal rail route requires the approval of a number of authorities businesses. Constructing on restricted federal property provides one other stage of issue.
“I do not suppose something is totally different now than it has been prior to now 10 years,” Dover mentioned. “The venture had all the time been meant strictly to be used by navy personnel, households, and staff on base — proscribing entry by others is what posed the problem and required additional dialogue with the bottom and the Protection Division.”
The district’s Breeze bus routes cowl a number of areas of Camp Pendleton. A lot of the bus service is offered by the district’s Flex on-demand program, though the Mainside space within the southeast nook of the bottom is on the common route No. 315 that additionally takes passengers by means of components of Oceanside and Carlsbad.
Requested concerning the probabilities of approving a prepare station, a base spokesperson mentioned Thursday that no negotiations are underway at current.
“Camp Pendleton shouldn’t be presently concerned in any official discussions concerning a … prepare station on base property,” mentioned 2nd Lt. Anna R. Hornick. “Nevertheless, base officers keep a optimistic and enduring relationship with NCTD.”
The coastal route is San Diego County’s solely railroad hyperlink with Los Angeles and the remainder of america. It is also a part of the nationwide Strategic Rail Hall Community, which consists of 38,800 miles of monitor serving 193 navy installations nationwide.
Coaster and Amtrak service lengthen as far south because the Santa Fe Depot in downtown San Diego. Nevertheless, additionally within the transit district’s long-range plan is a proposal to open one other Coaster passenger station south of the depot to serve the San Diego Conference Middle.
The railroad has existed on the identical route because the Eighteen Eighties. From the start, it crossed land that turned Camp Pendleton in 1942.
For a few years there was a spur rail line that went from Oceanside by means of the Camp Pendleton Air Station to the Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station. That line was used to move navy tools through the Gulf Warfare within the early Nineteen Nineties, and within the late Nineteen Nineties it carried hundreds of Vietnam Warfare-era napalm canisters faraway from the weapons station.
Nevertheless, the spur line went by means of a slender canyon that was topic to erosion throughout heavy rains, and the tracks have been eliminated after damaging storms within the early 2000s.
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