None Aboard While Amtrak’s Coastal Service Suspended

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The Santa Barbara hospitality industry is being hit hard by nature’s assault on the Pacific Coast’s narrow rail system.


Amtrak, which normally runs six trains along oceanside tracks it leases from Union Pacific Corp., has not been able to operate the line since Jan. 9, when torrential rains rendered a section of the rails impassable.


“Has it hurt that Amtrak can’t get through? I’m sure that it has,” said Tom Patton, general manager of the Ramada Ltd. hotel and president of the Greater Santa Barbara Lodging Association. “Can I quantify that? No.”


The actual impact of the loss of the Coast Starlight (from L.A. to Seattle) and Pacific Surfliner (San Diego to Paso Robles) on Santa Barbara hotels will take a couple of months to assess, but the Santa Barbara Region Chamber of Commerce said that requests for information in January were down 32 percent from the year earlier.


“I heard that many hotels had the worst January ever,” said Annmarie Rogers, director of the chamber’s visitor center. “Even on that long weekend, the Martin Luther King holiday, usually everything is booked (but) they said it was slow.”


Northbound Coast Starlight service won’t resume until at least Feb. 28. Beginning on Feb. 8, the Pacific Surfliner will take passengers only as far as Santa Barbara; from there, they will transfer to buses arranged by Amtrak.


“Anytime there is a disruption on the freight line, it disrupts our service as well,” said Sarah Swain, a spokeswoman for Amtrak. “We run into disruptions periodically, but this time we had multiple disruptions. “This is going to affect (revenues).”


While hotels took a hit from the lack of tourist spending, the rail washout and the Jan. 10 La Conchita mudslide also stranded people in town, mitigating the losses. Other losses will be made up in the coming months from trips that were postponed but not canceled.


The loss of Amtrak service took a toll because it has hindered the heavily-promoted Santa Barbara Car Free Project the city runs in conjunction with Amtrak.


“I’ve gotten calls from people who have postponed their travel so they can still come on the train,” said Mary Byrd, manager of the Car Free Project. “It’s good for our project that the trains are going to be running again soon.”


An average 5,000 passengers make trips each day between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara on the five daily Pacific Surfliner trains (six run on weekends). The Coast Starlight, which runs from L.A. to Seattle, runs one train daily in each direction and carries about 1,000 passengers, 500 each way.


That volume pales besides Amtrak’s most-traveled route, the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, where 30,000 people climb aboard for part of the way each day.


Along the Pacific Coast, Amtrak runs on tracks leased from private rail systems such as Union Pacific. The freight carrier reopened the route on a limited basis on Jan. 22, but only for its own trains and only at night. Workers have been upgrading tracks during the day.


“If we let (Amtrak) run, it would break up the maintenance windows and extend the amount of time it would take to fully restore the route to normal operating speeds,” said John Bromley, a spokesman for Union Pacific.


Some believe there is a lack of urgency on the part of Union Pacific because it transports the bulk of its northbound freight through the Central Valley, not along the coastal route the commuter line uses. “It’s not a priority for Union Pacific to get it back into service,” said Jack Kyser, senior economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.


Amtrak required a $1.2 billion subsidy to maintain its $3 billion operation through the current fiscal year, ending Sept. 30. President Bush, seeking to cut the federal deficit, eliminated the subsidy in the fiscal 2006 budget proposal.

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