Dispute Puts a Stop to Additional Morning Train for Irvine

Less than a week after Irvine got a third morning train to Los Angeles, Amtrak officials announced Thursday that the additional stop would be discontinued after Sunday because of a dispute with the freight firm that owns the rail line.

Officials with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Co. said the extra train stop in Irvine at 6:50 a.m. threatened to kick off “a domino effect” of scheduling problems for freight and passenger trains all along the rail corridor.

Amtrak officials said they were upset by Santa Fe’s decision, but hoped the freight train firm would reconsider.

“We didn’t think this new train was going to cause this sort of deal,” said Arthur Lloyd, an Amtrak spokesman. “We’re just sorry that the general public has been caught in the middle.”

Transportation officials in Orange County, meanwhile, suggested the move by Santa Fe had little to do with scheduling concerns. Instead, they argued, the firm is trying to gain leverage in negotiations with government officials in Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties trying to purchase the rail right of way and open it up to more commuter trains.

Orange County Transportation Commission officials noted that the extra train stop in Irvine hardly ruffled the delicate schedule of trains running along the line between San Diego and Los Angeles.

A northbound Amtrak train from San Diego passes through the Irvine Station anyway and a stop there adds at most three minutes to the schedule, they said. Moreover, that delay can be absorbed because padding on the train’s running time is already built into the schedule, OCTC officials said.

The 6:50 a.m. train stop in Irvine was added Monday to two other existing morning stops. The other stops in Irvine Station at 6:15 a.m. and 7:58 a.m. will remain unchanged, Amtrak officials said.

Santa Fe officials argued in a letter distributed Friday to Amtrak passengers that the extra train stop in Irvine “jeopardizes our ability to provide on-time performance for not just that additional train, but all other trains in the corridor.”

They noted that agreements with Amtrak called for no new train stops at Irvine until work to lay down new tracks along the rail corridor is completed in 1991. Moreover, they said that Amtrak had failed to consult with Santa Fe about the change, which they said had been standard procedure in the past.

“If Amtrak had come up to us and hammered out an agreement, it wouldn’t have been any problem,” Michael Martin, a Santa Fe spokesman, said in an interview Thursday. “But trying to get a fastball or slider by us while we’re not looking is not in our opinion accepted business practice.”