After 18 months, work is so close to clearing the tracks, tunnels and bridges along San Diego’s long-closed desert railway that the next project will be to engineer the political path to attract commerce on the 70-mile line of the San Diego & Arizona Eastern Railway.

The desert line, which runs to Plaster City in Imperial County, will connect San Diego to the national Union Pacific line from the local San Diego & Imperial Valley Railroad, which runs freight overnight from Downtown to San Ysidro along Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks.

The link between the two is the portion of the railway through Mexico from Tijuana to east of Tecate, run by Ferrocarriles Peninsulares del Noroeste, an affiliate of Carrizo Gorge Railway, which in turn is clearing the desert line for operation.

“Once the gorge is opened, that Imperial Valley sand will move again,” says R. Mitchel Beauchamp, FPN’s manager and a director of the Sweetwater Authority. The spectacular Carrizo Gorge trestle, along with many of the line’s 21 tunnels, were badly damaged and closed in a series of storms and fires more than 20 years ago.

Beauchamp also expects the desert line will carry grain for cattle and for the Tecate brewery along with lumber, industrial coke and butane gas — cheaper, more safely and with unlimited freight hours than along the coast. He’d also like to see a rail spur to the new Toyota truck bed plant gearing up in Tijuana.

But he says there are problems — not with the tracks but with authorities. Beauchamp objects to what he calls stodgy management of the Metropolitan Transit System, Mexican government officials who he complains won’t let freight trains run faster than 4 mph through Tijuana and the San Diego Railroad Museum board, which he says is trying to thwart the railway’s effort to use the Campo depot and Jacumba station. “Which is more important: regional freight or a railroad museum?” Beauchamp asks.

Jack Limber, the MTS interim general manager, says any port or city that has two freight railroads is better than one. “We share the hope to reopen the line and that it will have the business generated to operate — assuming it can be done and maintained and kept open,” he says. “It has a long history of floods and landslides and other natural catastrophes.”

Mike Ortega, the manager of marketing and sales for SD&IV, hopes the desert line’s opening will help business. “That would at first glance affect the volume,” he says. “But the market’s big enough that there would be other business. There’s quite a bit of business with the maquiladoras.”

— Terence J. Burke