I read with interest Contributing Editor David Peter Alan’s recent Railway Age commentary of Jan. 22, 2025, titled “Fourth of a Series: New Through Tracks Proposed for L.A. Union Station.” The project is worthy of coverage, and the first two-thirds of the article had interesting and useful information, as have the other articles in this series. But I felt that the final section (“Is the Project Worthwhile”) had several factual errors and reached some marginally supported conclusions.
The article states “Even if Metrolink expands to hourly service on every line, the added service would not add to the commuter crunch, at least not significantly.” But the plans and current capital projects for the lines connecting to Union Station assume significantly greater frequency than hourly service on every line. The details of planning documents from Metrolink, the LOSSAN Agency and Caltrans differ, but all plan substantial increases in frequency.
An explicit goal of Metrolink’s current SCORE capital improvement plan is 30-minute frequencies in each direction on each line (with the likely exception of the Riverside line): “Passengers will go to a train station and wait no more than 30 minutes for the next train in both directions.” The San Bernardino line already has that level of service at peak times. Enabling 30-minute frequencies is the purpose of several Metrolink double-tracking projects that will begin construction in the next 2-3 years. Numerous new and expanded layover and maintenance facilities are in various stages of construction to handle the larger train fleet required for more frequent service, and these projects are being designed with the ability to expand further when the system requires it.
Longer-term plans are even more ambitious. The LOSSAN Corridor Optimization Study planned for 15-minute frequencies on the inner portions of three Metrolink lines (Orange County, Ventura County, and Antelope Valley) plus 30-minute frequencies on a fourth (p. 33). A study of 15-minute frequencies on the San Bernardino line has also been performed. At least one unfunded project in the Metrolink capital plan is a maintenance facility to enable 15-minute frequencies and electrification on a portion of the Ventura County line (p. 39).
Another long-term capital project is a double-tracking to enable 15-minute frequencies on the Antelope Valley line (Appendix 2.1-9). For the tracks between Burbank and Fullerton that are shared by all of the planned run-through services, infrastructure is being designed to support 5-minute headways (p. 62). The 2024 State Rail Plan netgraph is less ambitious for a post-HSR Metrolink, but still shows 30-minute frequencies on four Metrolink lines out of Union Station and a total of 24.5 inbound and 24.5 outbound revenue HSR and conventional trains per hour at peak times at Union Station (Appendix 1). Through-running enables this level of service by reducing platform dwell times, increasing the number of tracks in and out of the station, and eliminating the many non-revenue movements to and from storage and maintenance facilities that must happen at a terminal station, but that would occur elsewhere in the network with through-running.
The article states that “There is no talk of expanding Amtrak service on the Surf Line and, even if there were, much of the expanded service would run outside commuting hours, when station capacity is not an issue.” The LOSSAN Agency is in varying stages of expanding layover and maintenance facilities in San Diego, Goleta, and San Luis Obispo to accommodate more trainsets overnight. In the medium term, the goal is hourly service on the Surf Line, which indeed would largely increase frequencies outside commuting hours. But the State Rail Plan envisions substantial increases in the frequencies of intercity Pacific Surfliner type trains (whether under that branding or something else). The State Rail Plan netgraph shows two trains per hour south to San Diego, one per hour north to Burbank (with half continuing on the current LOSSAN north corridor and the other half terminating in Santa Clarita), and one per hour east to Palm Springs, more than doubling the current peak Surfliner service. Metrolink (p. 5-1) and San Diego NCTD hope to increase track speeds to 110 mph on significant portions of the line in Orange and San Diego counties, and Metrolink design standards call for 90 mph track speeds everywhere else. Los Angeles to San Diego limited-stop service in close to 2 hours is feasible, which would be competitive with driving even at low traffic times and would surely draw increased ridership.
There are at least two ready objections to all of this: (1) Would the demand be there to actually fill all these trains, and (2) Can California afford to build the infrastructure to enable this service expansion? On the funding side, who can say? California has invested a substantial amount in dramatically expanding its transit and passenger rail services over the past 30 years, and voters have frequently (though not always) voted in favor of tax and bond measures to fund this. But the wish list of projects in the state is long, and history is filled with plans for rail projects that never got built. Most likely only a fraction of what is in the State Rail Plan is likely to be built in any reasonable timeframe.
I think the demand would absolutely be there on a network with a substantially higher level of service and better transit connections. Southern California has an enormous population, plenty of density and many miles of commuter/regional passenger rail infrastructure, but a level of rail ridership much lower than other large U.S., let alone European or Asian, cities. Provide Long Island Rail Road or Metra levels of service—or to take a closer example, recently expanded Caltrain levels of service—on that network and demand will be much higher. “If you build it, they will come.”
The recent electrification of Caltrain and resulting faster and more frequent service demonstrates this: Caltrain reports that ridership in the first three months of electrified service was 41% greater than the year before. Through-running itself is a form of improved service. Current 15-20 minute turns of the Surfliner, accompanied by a slow few minutes going in the wrong direction for trains to and from San Diego, will become a 5-minute dwell and a direct exit in the right direction. Lengthy (or unavailable) connections between Metrolink lines at Union Station will become a 3-minute dwell. Los Angeles lacks the single strong center of a city like Chicago and has many dense areas that would benefit from direct connections. A station pair like Burbank to Anaheim, or trips more generally between the San Fernando Valley and Orange County, would be substantially more attractive with frequent single-seat service and a short dwell time at Union Station.
The substantial ongoing investments in subway and light rail transit in Los Angeles make an “if you build it, they will come” story even more plausible in Los Angeles. The recent Regional Connector subway and soon-to-open D Line extension and associated yard improvements will substantially increase frequency of service and ridership on lines serving Union Station. Ground just broke on the Southeast Gateway Line light rail, which will eventually include a new subway line to Union Station and be the third L.A. Metro station at Union Station. Six additional new subway or light rail lines or extensions, with at least partial funding, with completion dates ranging from this year to 2057, will feature stops at Metrolink stations: A line extension (Metrolink Pomona, with planned extensions to Metrolink Clairmont and Montclair), Orange County Streetcar (Metrolink Santa Ana), East San Fernando Valley line (Metrolink Van Nuys and one or more stations on Metrolink Antelope Valley line), Sepulveda Pass Transit Corridor (Metrolink Van Nuys), C line extension (Metrolink Norwalk), and G line light rail (Metrolink Chatsworth). Two of these Metro lines will run to LAX (C line and Sepulveda Pass), and one (A line) may be extended later to Ontario airport. Plausible extensions to the OC Streetcar include Disneyland and John Wayne Airport. Add to this mix policies favoring housing development near transit and high-speed rail lines that may ultimately serve San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, Las Vegas and Phoenix, and demand for rail travel to and through Union Station could grow greatly.
These projects will surely take longer than currently planned to realize, and some will be scaled back or abandoned. But Union Station run-through tracks and related improvements would be worthwhile even if only a fraction of this ambition is realized. Through-running will bring immediate benefits to travelers going from one side of Los Angeles to the opposite side. And it will remove one of the many bottlenecks that stand in the way of the increased level of service that billions of dollars of other capital projects already under construction are intended to make possible.
