Updating My California Rail Riding Resumé

SFMTA photo

For 77 days in 2019, I held the distinction of having ridden every rail transit line in the United States in its entirety. Then two events happened. One was the opening of the segment on Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) between Larkspur and San Rafael on December 14, 2019. The other came three months later: the COVID-19 virus. In the meantime, a few more extensions of rail transit sprang up around the country, most of them in the West and a majority in California itself.

In mid-June, I went back to the Bay Area for the first time in five years to catch up on transit developments there, with the addition of a day in downtown Los Angeles to ride the new Regional Connector on the A (Blue) Line.

The highlight of the trip was the Bay Area, and it included a lot of riding in the 53 hours I had there. It also provided an opportunity to look at the city that has recently been vilified as a failing city that is not only going broke, but it’s unsafe, too. I am pleased to report that they city is busy and appears healthy, with plenty of tourists looking it over, and the locals going about their daily activities, and both riding the immense variety of local transit. The local transit itself is facing financial challenges. I will report on that in my series about the “fiscal cliff” facing many transit agencies, but a visitor would not know that from seeing the city and riding the transit.

To set the scene, it is necessary to understand that transit throughout the Bay Area is highly balkanized. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA or Muni) operates the buses, light rail, historic streetcars, and unique cable cars (priced as a tourist attraction at $8.00 per ride with no transfer privileges) in San Francisco itself. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) runs metropolitan-style trains throughout the region, with lines that radiate from Market Street in San Francisco like a big X. The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) connects with BART and is centered on San José, running light rail and buses in the area. Caltrain also connects San José and San Francisco with frequent regional-rail (also known as “commuter rail”) service on a single line. At the other end of the area SMART serves the North Bay area as far as Santa Rosa, with expansions planned. There are also ferries that run from San Francisco’s historic Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, and a number of locally oriented bus agencies, some of which are operated by the counties or municipalities.

This can be confusing to visitors, especially those from major cities where all the local transit is operated by a single agency, as in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. The latter two cities are also served by New Jersey Transit, which also offers similar “one-stop shopping in the Garden State. The Bay Area situation requires riders to check carefully to make sure that the providers they plan to use connect with each other conveniently. BART usually runs every 20 minutes and Muni’s rail lines run more often, so connectivity within San Francisco and the East Bay is usually good. Going further out on the regional railroads is not as easy, but that holds for the cities with a single transit agency, too.

My transit adventure started with a ride on BART on Monday, June 17. Amtrak Train 6 arrived in Richmond, about 5:30, roughly one hour behind schedule. The train terminates at Emeryville, where Amtrak runs shuttle buses to downtown San Francisco, but local transit connections can be tricky. It is not easy to get to BART from Emeryville, but Amtrak trains stop at the same station as BART at Richmond, its northwestern terminal. My BART goal was to ride the new extension to Milpitas and Berryessa, in the northern part of San José. BART’s Orange Line goes there directly from Richmond, and the one-way trip took 78 minutes. BART runs on broad gauge (5’6”) track with a broad loading gauge, so the cars appear to be very wide, capable of accommodating the sort of crowds it carried before the COVID virus hit, but not today. With many tech workers now working “remotely” from home several days a week, if not every day, BART’s ridership has plummeted. Yet the remaining riders appear to need BART and use it regularly. All of the equipment is new, not counting the monorail to Oakland Airport or eBART, a standard-gauge DMU (diesel multiple-unit) that takes riders the last two stops: Pittsburg Center and Antioch on the Yellow Line, at the northeast end of the system. The line to Berryessa was not particularly scenic, but it extends 51 miles, long for a metropolitan-style line. Station agents were helpful, and the trains rode well. BART’s financial challenges did not seem obvious to the riders on the line. I had accomplished the first of my tasks before heading back to San Francisco.

Tuesday was my day to spend in San Francisco and absorb some of the flavor of the city. I stayed in North Beach, historically an Italian community and famous during the past century for the City Lights Bookstore, which honored and published the works of “Beat” authors like Allan Ginsburg, Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac, and the Condor Club, which featured the first “topless” go-go dancer 60 years ago. Vestiges of those traditions survive today, including City Lights and the Condor, and one of the advantages of the neighborhood is that it lies within walking distance of Chinatown and the city’s downtown core.

I took a walking tour on Tuesday morning that highlighted those areas and had time to observe that life as usual was proceeding in the city, much as it had before the virus struck. I had met two tourists from Romania on that tour (there were also some from England), and we went to the St. Francis Fountain in the city’s Mission District for lunch. It’s a lunch counter and soda fountain, featuring the high-backed wooden booths that were part of the original décor from 1918, and the burgers and sandwiches were served on sourdough bread, a local San Francisco touch. The bus we took toward downtown provided me with the opportunity to ride the new mileage on the Muni Metro light rail system.

That was on the “T Third Street” line. Most of the line opened for service in 2007 and runs on the surface, primarily on Third Street. At the downtown end of the line is a four-stop extension with one surface stop (at Fourth and Brennan Streets) and the new Central Subway that runs underground, with stops at the Moscone Center, Union Square and Chinatown. Weekend service began there on November 19, 2022, and full service started on January 7, 2023.

It was pleasant to see Muni doing so well. Railway Age and its sibling publications reported the downward spiral that the railroad industry and transit suffered in 2020, after the virus struck. It was hard on transit everywhere, by it seemed to hit San Francisco with particular severity. BART and Caltrain were hard-hit, but Muni seemed hit the hardest, at least of the major transit systems. The Muni Metro light rail lines lost 90% of their riders at one time, the historic streetcar lines were canceled, and the bus system was down to only 17 lines. Today the system has recovered almost to pre-COVID levels of service, although ridership has not recovered commensurately. We will report soon on the agency’s financial picture but, at least Muni is talking about expansion, rather than service cuts, at least for now.

After that, there was time to visit the San Francisco Transit Museum near the Ferry Building, and ride PCC streetcars, some of which originally ran in the City by the Bay, up Market Street to the Castro and back on the F Line. A few of the cars always belonged to Muni, and sport historic Muni liveries. Others came from other agencies like SEPTA and sport the liveries of many transit providers who ran similar cars in the past, although all bear Muni numbers. The collection also features older cars from Milan, Italy and other places, but they were not running when I visited.

The other new segment in the area was on SMART, between Larkspur and San Rafael, the Marin County seat. Wednesday was my last day in the Bay Area, and my objective was located across the Bay. There were no opportunities to see local museums because of Juneteenth, but SMART was running a weekday schedule. It did not run frequently, but weekend service is much sparser.

I walked to the Ferry Building and took the boat to Larkspur. The ferry dock and train station are not near the town’s historic downtown area. I had ten minutes to get to the SMART station, but I was not familiar with the route, so I took a wrong turn and missed the train. It could have been worse; the next train was only 32 minutes later. There was little to see on the way to San Rafael, but I got off there and explored the town for an hour before catching the next train going north. It is an upscale suburban town, with activity that includes a theater with a 1970s look, and some beautiful buildings. I rode north to Novato, an old town that could have been described similarly, except that it is not a county seat. I had about two hours there, enough time to explore the town and have lunch.

There are two other interesting towns on the line: Petaluma and Santa Rosa. I had visited both when I first rode SMART five years ago. They are attractive old towns with plenty of history. Film buffs will recognize the train station in Santa Rosa from Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1941), from which Uncle Charlie (a serial killer, a bit of his past discovered by his niece) took his fateful last ride on the old Northwestern Pacific. Now that SMART trains are running, the station is back, hosting them.

I then took the train from Novato back to Larkspur, walked to the ferry terminal, and took the boat back to the Ferry Building. It took slightly more than a half-hour to walk past the historic pier buildings along the waterfront and past re-purposed warehouses on King Street for my final Bay Area rail adventure: my last ride on Caltrain before it switches to electrified operation, scheduled for this fall.

The Caltrain station is not interesting, but it is served by the N-Judah light rail line. Caltrain started as the Peninsula Commute on the San Francisco & San José Railroad, which first ran in 1863. The service was operated by Southern Pacific for most of its life (1870-1992) and is the only legacy “commuter” line west of Chicagoland. Today it is a very busy line, and it has returned to its pre-COVID schedule with local trains (particularly on weekends and mid to late-evening on weekdays), “limited” trains operating skip-stop service, and three “Baby Bullet” trains during peak-commuting hours in each direction, both morning and PM peaks, with three hourly departures in each direction. Those trains make only six intermediate stops during the 47-mile trip between San Francisco and Diridon Station in San José, which is also served by Amtrak and Altamont Commuter Express (ACE) trains to Stockton.

For the moment, the trains run with F40PH and MPI MP36 diesel locomotives and Chicago-style “gallery” cars or Bombardier multi-level cars. Some show Caltrain livery, but others maintain their Metrolink (from Los Angeles) white paint schemes with blue or green stripes and lettering, often with a Caltrainlogo obscuring the Metrolink markings. Caltrain plans to retire all that equipment, except for the few peak-hour trains between San José and Gilroy to the south. The rest of the fleet will consist of Stadler double-deck EMU equpment, some of which is already on the property.

It was an amazing feat to schedule so much service with overtakes on a double-track line with only two new passing tracks built for the faster service. There is not much to see at either Diridon Station or Tamien Station in San José, where I took a very brief side trip. I took another “Baby Bullet” train from Diridon Station to Palo Alto, the home of Stamford University. There was no time to see the campus, so I got on a “Limited” train, which made only three additional stops on the way back to downtown San Francisco. I spent a few more hours riding before I left town, and eventually ended up on Mission Street, waiting for the overnight bus that would take me to Santa Barbara.

While my trip focused on the Bay Area, there was one new segment of rail transit that I had to catch in Los Angeles. It’s the Regional Connector, a new 1.9-mile primarily underground route between Union Station and 7th Street/Metro Center. It’s part of the A (Blue) Line, which goes to Long Beach, and it provides an alternative to taking the B (Red) or D (Purple) Lines, the same sort of metropolitan-style subway line that New Yorkers would recognize) between the two endpoints.

To get to the City of Angels, I had to start by waiting on a corner on San Francisco’s Mission Street for an “Amtrak California” overnight bus to Santa Barbara. It was scheduled to arrive at 10:35. The new and nearby Salesforce Transit Center was closed at the time and, as Mark Twain might have noticed, it was cold on that June night. The bus followed the Coast and terminated at Santa Barbara about 6:30. That left enough time to explore the beautiful Mission-style station that the SP had used for so many years before turning it over to Amtrak. Train 770, a Surf Line train, left on schedule at 6:53 and arrived at Los Angeles Union Station slightly more than three hours later. It was time for my eight hours there.

My first task was to ride the new Regional Connector. It originates at Union Station and forms part of the A (Blue) Line to Long Beach, which used to originate at 7th Street/Metro Center. The extension uses the same track as the E (Gold) Line, and both lines stop at the Arts District – Little Tokyo station. After that, the new line runs underground with stops at Historic Broadway, Arts/Bunker Hill and Grand Avenue on the way to 7th Street / Metro Center, and onto the original line.

My task of riding new transit extensions completed, I joined a contact for lunch at the Pantry Café, which opened in 1924 and retains its historic look. For most of its history, it was open all night, and I remember several “midnight lunches” I had enjoyed at the counter. Now they close right after lunch. After lunch, I saw the Japanese-American Museum, which focuses on the relocation and incarceration in concentration camps of Americans of Japanese heritage during World War II. They were moved from their homes on the West Coast to inhospitable camps elsewhere in the country. When they were released at the end of the war, many made their way back to the Coast, often facing a difficult homecoming. The community re-established itself over the years, and the government offered an apology and reparations, but that happened a half-century later. The museum is conveniently located for transit, and it provided a moving educational experience.

After that, it was time to grab a sandwich at Phillippe the Original, a few blocks from Union Station, and catch Train 4 for Chicago, on my way home. I still need to ride a new segment of Phoenix’s Valley Metro Rail, and there is a new light rail segment scheduled to open in Seattle later this year. There are a few more projects in the pipeline, but my trip to California gave me a chance to catch up with developments there and see how the Bay Area is getting along. It appears to be doing well, but we will report soon on how transit in the San Francisco and Los Angeles regions are doing financially.

David Peter Alan is one of North America’s most experienced transit users and advocates, having ridden every rail transit line in the U.S., and most Canadian systems. He has also ridden the entire Amtrak and VIA Rail network. His advocacy on the national scene focuses on the Rail Users’ Network (RUN), where he has been a Board member since 2005. Locally in New Jersey, he served as Chair of the Lackawanna Coalition for 21 years and remains a member. He is also a member of NJ Transit’s Senior Citizens and Disabled Residents Transportation Advisory Committee (SCDRTAC). When not writing or traveling, he practices law in the fields of Intellectual Property (Patents, Trademarks and Copyright) and business law. Opinions expressed here are his own.