CA: Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner launches 13th roundtrip between San Diego and Los Angeles, with plans to expand still more

For decades, the coastal train route between San Diego and Los Angeles has dazzled millions of passengers with sweeping views of the Pacific, its occasional bluff-top perch making you feel so close you could easily dip your toes in the sand below.

Stunning vistas aside, the 128-mile trip linking California’s two largest cities provides travelers an escape from the mind-numbing traffic congestion that motorists must endure on Interstate 5. It’s no surprise then that demand for travel on Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner rail line has grown considerably since the early years of the pandemic when the number of daily San Diego-to-L.A. trips was slashed in half.

In a milestone move that will finally restore daily service to pre-pandemic levels, a 13th round trip is being added to the schedule, which will launch Monday and bring the popular route closer to Amtrak’s long-standing goal of having hourly trains between the two cities.

No matter that sections of crumbling cliffs and hillsides along the coastal route — most notably in the Del Mar and San Clemente areas — have forced regular service disruptions the past several years. One closure went on for nearly six months, requiring passengers to take a bus between the Oceanside and Irvine train stations. And just this weekend, there was yet another closure so that crews could continue work on building a 1,400-foot-long catchment wall at the landslide site in San Clemente.

The LOSSAN ( Los Angeles – San Diego – San Luis Obispo) rail corridor agency that oversees the Surfliner route insists that even as service continues to expand, that will not sideline the regular repairs and long-term plans for a potential relocations of a portion of the coastal track.

“Our stakeholders that own those portions of the track are working diligently on measures to protect those areas,” said LOSSAN Managing Director Jason Jewell. “With their efforts, we are comfortable with putting out more reliable service, and we also want to support them in implementing those track protection measures. This new round trip will provide customers with more traveling options to fit their daily schedules and just get out of their cars and off the highways.”

Second busiest route

Spanning 351 miles and traversing six counties from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, the full Surfliner line is among Amtrak’s busiest inner-city rail routes in the nation, second only to the Northeast Corridor. While it previously had 13 daily round-trip trains, that schedule lasted only briefly — between October 2019 and March 2020 — before it was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In just the past year, the route’s service schedule expanded rapidly amid growing demand, with the number of daily round trips going from 10 to 12 in early 2025. Little by little, each of those additional round trips helps fill in two-hour service gaps in the San Diego-L.A. schedule, Jewell says.

With the latest addition, a 7 a.m. departure out of San Diego will be added, erasing the two-hour gap between the 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. trains. On the southbound route, a 7:10 p.m. train is being added, filling in the hole between the 6:10 p.m. and 8:10 p.m. departures.

Still, there are service holes that remain to be plugged, which Jewell says should come in time. The new northbound schedule that goes into effect this week will have one-hour gaps between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., and 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

“It’s always been a goal of ours to bring service back to pre-COVID levels, so we’ve been planning to do that, along with the state, to help meet future state rail plan goals,” Jewell said. “Some of the resources needed to do that are equipment and funding. Because we cut service down right after COVID, we turned equipment back in that the state had leased from Amtrak because it wasn’t cost-efficient to pay for equipment we weren’t going to use.”

Toward that end, the LOSSAN agency succeeded in getting its first federal grant — for $27 million — last year, which Jewell said marked a big turning point for the agency. The money was specifically allocated for bringing back the Surfliner route to 13 round trips between Los Angeles and San Diego. The grant requires the state to provide matching funds, which Jewell says the state has committed to doing.

Eroding coastline

Increasingly, though, the full Los Angeles- San Diego- San Luis Obispo rail corridor has become susceptible to sea-level rise given its proximity to the coast in places like San Clemente and Del Mar, where the tracks are either right beside the beach or situated on fragile bluffs that are constantly pounded by ocean waves.

And the inevitable result is reduced rail service as various agencies work to schedule repairs needed to keep the sometimes precarious route operating safely. Taken together, the on-again, off-again passenger service disruptions through San Clemente add up to more than one year since 2021, when the land beneath the tracks slipped in the Cypress Shore community just north of San Onofre State Beach.

In addition to clearing the way for work to be done on the 1,400-foot wall in San Clemente, the weekend suspension of rail service allowed for continued work on the latest phase of a decades-old bluff stabilization project in Del Mar.

State Sen. Catherine Blakespear of Encinitas, who has long been an advocate for the Surfliner corridor, said she welcomes the addition of a 13th round trip while still emphasizing the need to address the aging infrastructure and the unstable topography surrounding the coastal route.

“My main interest is to have the ability for more people to go more places along the corridor, so having this greater frequency allows for people to say if I miss my train for some reason, there will be another,” said Blakespear, who chairs the Senate Transportation Subcommittee on LOSSAN Rail Corridor Resiliency. “People have a very low tolerance for inconsistency. They need to be able to get where they’re going.

“At the same time, we need to make sure we address the infrastructure challenges, which are particularly acute around San Clemente and Del Mar. They’re being reinforced in place, but for how long will that be feasible? Will we have a train track sitting in the ocean at some point? But I don’t see it as incompatible that we’re looking at different infrastructure challenges at the same time we’re increasing the frequency of train travel. Those aren’t incompatible.”

Still on the table for the long term are plans to reroute about 1.7 miles of track that traverse the Del Mar bluffs by tunneling a new rail line beneath the city of Del Mar. The price is hefty — about $4 billion — and the project would happen no earlier than 2035, according to the San Diego Association of Governments.

The agency received $300 million in state funding in 2022 to cover planning for the project.

“No question it’s on the slow track,” Blakespear said. “It’s a frustration for me and those of us who want to be responsive to the environment. In the meantime, I’m happy to see an additional route.”

Staff writer Phil Diehl contributed to this report.

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