High-Speed Rail from Vegas to La Cañada? The Crystal Lake Freeway?

I just love writing about things that could have been, but never panned out. In the past I’ve written about plans to turn the valley into a reservoir, construct a racetrack at CV Park, build Montrose Junior High, and the wholesale development of the Verdugo Mountains. This time I’ll write about plans to build high-speed rail and freeway over or through the San Gabriel Mountains back in 1969.

Some of you will remember the Concorde Supersonic Transport (SST) of the 1960s, an airliner that would travel at twice the speed of sound … New York to London in three hours. It was to revolutionize air transport but had some problems: It had a reputation for being incredibly loud (including creating sonic booms) and polluting. That denied it landings and takeoffs from LAX. Instead, Palmdale was to be the LA hub for SST flights. LA purchased thousands of acres of desert for the massive Palmdale Intercontinental Airport. The airport proposal set off a land boom in Palmdale. It also changed transportation goals for LA to a priority of getting people back and forth from the LA basin to Palmdale quickly.

One proposal was construction of a high-speed rail from Vegas to Palmdale Intercontinental Airport, which would continue into a tunnel piercing the San Gabriel Mountains. After 14 miles under the mountains, the train would exit at La Cañada then continue to LA. This 300-mph train would take international SST passengers landing in Palmdale either to Vegas in an hour, or to LA in minutes. This proposal had the advantage of money buy-in from Las Vegas.

Other proposals were either a vehicular tunnel or two cross-mountain freeways. The tunnel concept would, again, be 14 miles in length and, again, exit in La Cañada. That would have made it the longest vehicular tunnel in the world, eclipsing the then-longest tunnel in Switzerland (7.2 miles) twice over. (Since then, a longer tunnel, 15.2 miles, has been built in Norway, completed just last year.)

The cross-mountain freeway concept had two proposed freeways. The first was to extend the 2 Freeway over the San Gabriels. In 1969, the 2 Freeway was already planned to end at Foothill and Hilliard, as it does today. This new concept would continue the freeway up through Alta Canyada and across the mountains until it connected with the 14 Freeway, which was already under construction. This was to be called the 2/249 Freeway. The 2/249 Freeway would flow an estimated 96,000 vehicles a day through La Cañada by 1980. (For comparison, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 vehicles a day flow through CV on the 210 Freeway.)

The other proposal for a cross-mountain freeway was to be a second freeway in addition to the 2/249. This freeway would rise from the San Gabriel Valley about where the 605 connects with the 210, cross the mountains, and enter the Palmdale area at Valyermo. This was to be called the Crystal Lake Freeway.

Any of these concepts would have been massive engineering undertakings but at that time they were considered vital, even urgent. The SST was the wave of the future and other aerospace companies were working on SST concepts that would carry nearly as many passengers as the 747. This Palmdale-based airport was going to happen and transportation to and from it would be vital.

But as we know, the SST concept never really took off (pun intended) due largely to public perception of its cost and environmental issues, and the Palmdale “Intercontinental” Airport was never built. Interesting today to think that the high-speed rail tunnel and the various cross-mountain freeway concepts were considered a done-deal over 50 years ago.

A correction from last week thanks to one of my readers. Regarding John Wayne’s legacy in his hometown of Glendale, I stated that only one place carried his name, the John Wayne Performing Arts Center, at his alma mater Glendale High. On Jan. 19 of this year the Glendale school board voted unanimously to remove his name from the performing arts center due largely to his racist comments made in the 1970s.