June 12, 2026, update on UPRR track rehab project on the park’s southeast edge. A short slide show is followed by background and more details. More updates to come!
In a nutshell: Much more clearing has been done. Wood is massed on the embankment above unprotected wetlands and small creeks. For park visitors, large industrial buildings loom over a ragged fringe of vegetation, much as they did in the 1930s when the park was new. Problems are emerging, on the landscape and with the plans and approvals. The railroad seems to have informally promised to pay the Parks Department for replanting. It is not clear how these new plantings and the wetlands are to be maintained.
Below: photos looking NE (left) and SE (right) show the park west of the foot of Dwight Way (top left in both photos) on May 3, before clearing, and May 15, afterwards.
The quick June 12 slide show below summarizes the current status. Use arrows to advance slides.
History: Aquatic Park and the Transcontinental Railroad: The transcontinental railroad reached Oakland via Niles Canyon in 1869. The Central Pacific, later Southern Pacific and now Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR), almost immediately began building northeast along the shoreline. By 1878, as the town incorporated, freight tracks were pushed through on what is now Berkeley’s Third Street, close to the waterfront. Along most of the length of today’s Aquatic Park, tracks ran directly on the low coastal bluff.
This led indirectly to the park’s creation more than 50 years later. Because the tracks cut off the waterfront, the Eastshore Highway feeding the new Bay Bridge — the Bay Area’s largest Great Depression public-works project — had to be built on fill offshore. Aquatic Park was a hasty fix to to keep this cutoff finger of Bay from becoming a stagnant cesspool of industrial and human waste.
The UPRR right of way is today hugged by vital buried sewer, water, fuel, and communications pipelines. It extends down the steep slope well into what most people think of as park. Shallow groundwater percolating through the slope waters trees and bushes that hid industrial buildings east of the tracks. Visitors and city officials came to think of the right of way as park.
The railroad takes back its land: The railroad had sought to reclaim its right-of-way before. The current project, in the planning since at least 2000, focuses on rebuilding the 7th Street underpass to the Port of Oakland, a major bottleneck. This requires tracks nearby where trains can wait or be reconfigured during the multi-year rebuild. The relatively undeveloped park south of the Dreamland for Kids playground is one of the few places where this seems practical.
An early application for approval included compensating for damage to Aquatic Park’s wetlands with extensive naturalization and planting along tracks in Albany at the Target parking lot north of Codornices Creek. The railroad replaced this in June 2024 with a different application, which state and federal agencies certified (approved) in December 2024. This approved plan changed the railroad’s description of its project, mapped wetlands differently, and says that the UPRR work will affect them only short-term –no costly mitigation aneeded.
Berkeley’s jarring wake-up: Berkeley seems to have overlooked or forgotten repeated notifications sent at least by 2020. Thus it knew nothing of this. Its consultants and staff, studying the marshy north end of the project area in an abortive effort to replace the Dreamland for Kids playground, were unaware of the boundary (personal experience on a walking tour with them), and the railroad and Regional Board knew nothing of their ideas or biological findings.
Disc golfers sounded the alarm in early April 2026, when notices and construction stakes threatened three of their “holes” — and their scheduled annual fundraiser. Hasty meetings — with park users, advocates, and agencies — seem to have led to a partial settlement that may not yet be written.
Here is what appear to be outcomes so far:
- Paying Park Department to plant: According to the Parks Department, through grants and direct payment, the railroad will give Berkeley’s Parks Department about $200,000 for around 1000 new trees and other plants, plus replacement disc-golf facilities. Youth interns at Waterside Workshops will help with planting and maintenance. This is not yet clearly related to what the Waterboard or existing state and federal certifications require.
- Loss of opportunities: By missing the planning process, Berkeley may have missed chances to get rid of antique sewage infrastructure, including dangerous deep tanks. It also may have missed the chance to lessen the impact of legacy pollutants such as PCBs, heavy metals, and hydrocarbons from former West Berkeley heavy industry and the railroad tracks themselves. Plans so far do not mention dust control or other reduction of this legacy pollution. Click here for advocates’ letters with background on these issues.
- Inaccurate plan and plan not followed: The railroad’s approved plan has significant inaccuracies and has not been followed. Promised protection against erosion and siltation is inadequate or missing. Only one creeklet is shown flowing from wetlands to the lagoon, with careful protection promised. However, at least three more such creeklets flow from railroad land to the lagoon farther north in the project area, none of them mapped. Tree and brush removal trashed the marshy headwaters and springs where most of these creeklets originated.
- Heavy work in the park: The railroad did much of its clearing in mid-May, removing the tall eucalyptus trees and other vegetation close to the tracks. Access was mainly through the Bayer campus east of the tracks, and most wood is to be removed that way, as the plan provides. But also as the plan provides, heavy work is being done in the park when the railroad deems it necessary.
- Unknown effects on wildlife: Loss of the eucalyptus, as in the photos above, means loss of trees used by herons and egrets, raptors and songbirds, and migrating monarch butterflies. We have no information on whether anyone checked for nesting birds. These species generally have no special legal protections. critical infrastructure has exemptions from many environmental requirements. And tall trees next to passenger trains are not a good idea. New trees, if maintained, could eventually be better habitat.
- Limited requirements for rehabilitation: The little “rehabilitation” that the plans require will be based on a handful of unflattering photos taken by the railroad in 2020 and 2022.
- Plans do not seem to expect great success from re-planting. For a much smaller area, the Regional Water Quality Control Board’s approval requires that half the trees survive after ten years, and allow up to half of all vegetation to be invasive and up to a quarter of the area to be bare after five years. This may be realism. In Aquatic Park, the Parks Department has mowed two previous grant-financed restorations of native plants into oblivion, and native wildflowers and grasses seeded as required by the Board were overrun by weeds within two years. As the railroad work went on, Parks staff fixed a broken water main that had been leaking for eight months — leaving a large area of bare soil a few feet from the main lagoon’s edge.
- No action to correct state’s official ignorance of any problem in Aquatic Park’s lagoons: The application makes clear that the state is officially unaware of any problem with water quality in the park’s lagoons. Abundant finding show, and the city’s many studies and grant proposals point out, that the lagoons are eutrophying, plagued by scummy algae and die-offs, frequently exceed allowable bacteria levels, are losing depth, and lack adequate circulation and water exchange with the Bay.) The lagoons were on the state’s 303d list of impaired waters, but essentially a typo conflated them with San Francisco’s Aquatic Park. This limits enforcement action, not just for the railroad. Correcting this on the state’s normal schedule takes years. Nothing has been done.
