John Rigney loves trains, but he loves horses even more. Each week, the 49-year-old horse owner rides from his Shadow Hills ranch aboard a Metrolink train to a job nearly 50 miles away in Fullerton.

But though he’s a major supporter of rail transit, he and other San Fernando Valley equestrians now battle a California bullet train with newly laid plans to blast through the last cowboy country in Los Angeles.

“I must be the biggest proponent of rail in Los Angeles,” said Rigney, who with his wife, Stacey, have three horses, including two born on their Shadow Hills property overlooking Tujunga Wash. “But this proposal, it doesn’t help anybody get to work.

“This is the last bastion of equine life in the city of Los Angeles. This recreation space, with thousands who also visit Hansen Dam, would be destroyed.”

• VIDEO: Horse owners oppose bullet train

As California officially broke ground Tuesday on its controversial high-speed rail system, regions across North Los Angeles County — including hundreds of horses and a mule in a “written” outcry — have drawn up battle lines against railway corridors proposed from Palmdale into the state’s largest city. The issue: how the state High-Speed Rail Authority will launch a 220-mph train into a dense population area with minimal impact on property values, businesses and richly cultured communities.

The now-$68-billion bullet train approved by voters seven years ago has been held up by political opposition, litigation and lack of cash. Tuesday’s ceremony, held in Fresno, celebrated ongoing construction by Sylmar-based Tutor Perini of the train’s first 29-mile leg to Madera. The nearly 400-mile line between San Francisco and L.A. is scheduled for completion by 2028.

The tunnel option

The first proposed bullet train path into Los Angeles, still on the table, called for a high-speed rail line from Palmdale to Burbank on a 51-mile route along Highway 14, passing through Acton, Agua Dulce and southern Santa Clarita. The train would then loop through the mountains into the northeast San Fernando Valley to run along the Union Pacific tracks near Interstate 5 through Sylmar, Pacoima and San Fernando before rolling into a station in Burbank.

But then residents and local officials complained that hundreds of homes and businesses could potentially be bulldozed, cutting cities and the northeast Valley in half, as well as their tightknit communities.

At the urging of county Supervisor Michael Antonovich and others, the rail authority late last summer proposed an alternative high-speed rail corridor: a 35-mile route from Palmdale tunneled beneath Angeles National Forest wilderness.

The vague 11th-hour plan to blast a tunnel beneath the San Gabriel Mountains drew fierce opposition from critics who dubbed its map “the yellow banana.” Then early last month, the rail authority revealed plans for a so-called East Corridor, with three alternative routes running directly through Lake View Terrace.

Now thousands of the Valley’s foothill community horse owners from Kagel Canyon to Tujunga, backed by representatives in Washington, have mounted a cavalry charge to stop it in its tracks.

“These new alternatives, from the yellow banana to the East Corridor, we got blindsided by them,” said David DePinto, a board member of the Shadow Hills Property Owners Association who helped form a group called SAFE, or Save Angeles Forest for Everyone, to battle a bullet train around or beneath Valley equestrian neighborhoods. “We feel like we were attacked. This came out of nowhere.

“This area has earned a reputation as the last intact equestrian community in the city of Los Angeles. It is now under threat,” DePinto said.

Just before Christmas, the SAFE coalition fired off a 19-page letter to the rail authority and elected officials to demand the East Corridor be taken off the table before it is subject to a lengthy environmental review this spring. At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, the group expects to fill All Nations Church in Lake View Terrace for a rally and information session.

Way of life seen at risk

Valley equestrians, whose mounts number more than 3,000 horses, had already been besieged by numerous plans over the years to tear at the heart of L.A. horse country, including a theme park.

Now they worry a bullet train would be the death knell to their independent way of life.

“This would displace us,” said Dale Gibson, president of the Equine Advisory Committee for Los Angeles, who boards 87 horses at his Gibson Ranch in Shadow Hills. “I can’t imagine anyone, especially horses, enjoying bullet trains racing overhead. It would spook every horse and rider — and make this equestrian area obsolete.

“I would lose my business. And all other equestrian-related businesses would follow the horses as they leave the area.”

Gibson was among more than a dozen equestrians who recently gathered at his ranch overlooking Tujunga Wash to ponder the impact.

The ranch would be affected by two of three alternative East Corridor routes, which are labeled E1, E2 and E3 and branch off from the central leg.

The proposed E2 and E3 routes would send a bullet screaming out of the mountains over the wash atop 16-foot-high pylons, they said, smacking in and out of tunnel entrances north of the 210 Freeway or below Wentworth Street. They would then burrow beneath the equestrian knoll of Shadow Hills before rolling into a Burbank Airport station.

Horse owners say the high overland trains would scar scenic Tujunga Wash, crisscrossed by equestrian trails amid seasonal blooming yucca, and their high-pitched vibrations would spook thousands of horses, a “flight animal” sensitive to the overland and underground noise. High-speed rail construction, which SAFE estimates will require the excavation of more than a million diesel-spewing truckloads of rock and dirt, would disrupt regions north and south of the mountain tunnel. Water supplies may also be at risk, they say.

Should horse owners choose to take flight, the region’s 15 to 20 boarding facilities, nearly half a dozen feed stores and numerous equine-related jobs would follow suit.

And should the East Corridor be entered in to a pending environmental impact report, property values could plummet for years. One rancher, who asked not to be identified, said she must now disclose the proposed bullet train during the pending sale of her $4 million boarding facility.

Animals ‘speak’ up

“We always have to fight for this community,” Nikki Ahton, 40, of Shadow Hills, who has three daughters who ride, said as she sat atop Kahlua, her buckskin quarter horse. “And this is one more fight for the equestrian community and our lifestyle.”

Even hundreds of horses and a mule have gotten into the fight by writing letters, aided by their owners, to the rail authority. One such missive was from TJ, a horse, and his best friend Riley, the mule, of Lake View Terrace.

“I understand that I’m ‘just a mule’ and TJ is ‘just a horse,’ ” they said in letters written by their owners, “but we appreciate nature and want to make sure that your train does not destroy it.”

A third alternative, the E1 route, would wind underground west of Hansen Dam before shooting out of a tunnel entrance in an industrial area at Montague Street and Branford Avenue in Sun Valley. But before it emerges, the train would surface east of Kagel Canyon above the Wildlife WayStation, a longtime rescue center for nearly 500 exotic animals, before submerging south of the Angeles Shooting Range.

“Scares me silly,” said WayStation founder Martine Colette.

Critics of the East Corridor mountain tunnel say it doesn’t follow current transportation corridors approved by voters in 2008.

Reps. Adam Schiff and Judy Chu have also stepped into the fray, with a letter to the rail authority last month urging that it reject its tunneling plan beneath the Angeles National Forest and San Gabriel Mountains National Monument.

“Any benefits gained by going through the forest do not outweigh the far greater costs to the project and the damage that might be done to our environment,” they wrote.

For its part, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which conducted public meetings from Palmdale to Burbank last month, said both its rail options down Highway 14 or through the mountains require an equal 20 miles of tunnels and that both are still under consideration.

The environmental study phase, which begins as early as March, “calls for an equal look at every one of those (rail) alignments,” said Michelle Boehm, its Southern California regional director. “There are no favorites.”

“Everything is on the table. Some things change. Some things go away completely. Some things are added,” Boehm said. “Right now, we’re going through the comments that we’ve received — including one from the mule — and are weighing that with those from other communities across various alignments.”

Antonovich, the county supervisor who had urged the authority to seek a better rail route than the Antelope Valley Freeway, is also asking it to answer questions about potential damage caused by a mountain tunnel into the northeast Valley.

“There is no route which is a sure thing, which everyone is happy about,” said Michael Cano, deputy of transportation for Antonovich, who twice a year dons a cowboy hat to host an equestrian trail ride through his district.

“The (equestrian) community has raised a number of concerns that need to be dealt with by the authority,” he said. The route “is in the authority’s court.”

Like Antonovich, Los Angeles Councilman Felipe Fuentes oversees a district that includes both of the proposed high-speed rail corridors. And like Antonovich, he said he wants to see a maximum benefit and minimum impact from the bullet train.

But as someone who grew up in the northeast Valley, he said the Highway 14 option that would run from Sylmar to Burbank could destroy its many longstanding communities.

The route would not only bulldoze a swath of homes and businesses north of San Fernando Road, he said. It would also close more than a dozen current rail crossings, which he said would “physically bifurcate the community.”

He said the same could be said of the tunnel option beneath the Angeles Forest.

For this reason, he urged the authority in a letter last summer to consider other options, such as allowing a “blended approach,” allowing the bullet train to share existing track by electrifying Metrolink and other trains. But if he had to pick from the current options, he said he’d choose the E1 mountain tunnel around Hansen Dam, with a train poking through into industrial Sun Valley.

“I’ve been thinking about it nonstop,” said Fuentes, a former Sacramento assemblyman. “I refuse to accept the four (rail) options as an end-all and be-all. … They’ve got to have more options.

“All of us who choose to live in the foothills understand that it needs to be protected from bad decisions. Whether it’s this, or too much density, we want to protect the rural lifestyle.”