In November 2024, the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA) awarded the latest round of funding to various transit and rail projects, including $63 million towards development of the Coast Rail Corridor. This corridor will link the existing, successful rail systems in Northern and Southern California by conventional rail, per the state’s rail plan. This project does not overlap with ongoing efforts to build the inland High Speed Rail system.
The Coast Rail Corridor was first formally described in a study undertaken by the San Luis Obispo Council Of Governments (SLOCOG), a group of municipalities in San Luis Obispo (SLO) County, located in the Central Coast region of California. The area includes the prominent CalPoly SLO university campus and is approximately halfway between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
As background, the existing state rail system includes two privately-owned Class I freight railroads (UP and BNSF), various publicly-owned shortline railroads (eg Caltrain, Metrolink, SMART, NCTD), and light-rail and metro rail systems that don’t connect to the national system (eg BART, SacRT, LA Metro). On the heavy rails, existing services include the two interstate, long-distance trains owned-and-operated nationally by Amtrak (California Zephyr, Coast Starlight, Texas Eagle, and Southwest Chief) and regional/suburban/commuter trains that are state-subsidized but co-branded under the Amtrak California name (Capitol Corridor, Pacific Surfliner, San Joaquins), or are independently operated by a Joint Powers Agreement (JPA) composed of served municipalities (eg Caltrain, ACE, Metrolink). Some confusion arises when the name of the train service, the name of the JPA, or the name of the rail owner, are the same. Relevant to the Coast Rail Corridor are the Capitol Corridor, Pacific Surfliner, and Coast Starlight services.
The Capitol Corridor operates in Northern California, from the heart of Silicon Valley in San Jose along the East Bay via Oakland and Martinez, north to the state capitol Sacramento and its suburbs in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The majority of this service operates on UP’s Coast Line and Niles and Martinez Subdivisions, and a small segment on Caltrain’s tracks.
The Pacific Surfliner operates predominantly in Southern California with a segment into Central California. The route begins in San Diego along the coast through Orange County and Los Angeles, then proceeding further along the coast through Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. This route uses track owned by UP, BNSF, Metrolink, and NCTD. But the relevant portion north of Los Angeles towards SLO is UP’s Coast Line.
Amtrak’s Coast Starlight service is a daily roundtrip service from Los Angeles to Seattle, Washington, via SLO, San Jose, Martinez, Sacramento, operating mostly on UP’s Coast Line and Valley Subdivision in California. Without a state subsidy, this service is often more expensive between the same destinations, with far less frequency and relative comfort onboard.
The Coast Rail Corridor identifies the section of UP’s Coast Line located south of the Capitol Corridor in San Jose, and north of the Pacific Surfliner in SLO, to quantify what rail improvements can be made to enable additional passenger service beyond the two daily one-way Coast Starlight trains. If enabled, this corridor would parallel the inland San Joaquins route from Bakersfield (almost LA; inland) to Sacramento, and would yield the first wholly-in-state all-rail link between the two state-sponsored systems in NorCal and SoCal. Existing connecting bus services between the two systems would be repurposed to provide more frequent connections outside of peak hours.
As the study describes, UP is amenable to making improvements to the Coast Line – especially since UP wouldn’t be ponying up the cash – with the proviso that tunnels along the route be modified to enable double-stack freight trains. As a note, all passenger trains operated by Capitol Corridor, Pacific Surfliner, and Coast Starlight use bilevel train cars, which are 4.9 meters tall above the rails. Whereas two stacked shipping containers would be at least 5.8 meters tall, so a double-stack freight car is even taller than that.
Other changes would include upgrading various existing one-way sidings – adjacent tracks that stub off the mainline and terminate, used to park traincars – to have remote controlled switches, and add crossover tracks so trains can pass each other. Most of UP’s Coast Line is single-track, and these upgrades would provide double-track meeting points for when freight and passenger trains need to pass. The exact location where the trains would meet depends on the scheduling, which limits how many new passengers trains can run on this route.
In addition to infrastructure changes, the study explores how new service or expanded existing service can use the upgraded route. The three options explored included an expansion of the Capitol Corridor down to SLO, an expansion of the Pacific Surfliner up to Salinas (just south of San Jose), and entirely new through-running service from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
From a cost perspective, the third option was the most expensive, requiring a new governance agency, new rolling stock, new operator contracts, and negotiations with Caltrain to use their tracks to San Francisco. Note that Caltrain in 2024 now operates the state’s first all-electric mainline railroad, and is unlikely to want diesel-only passenger trains returning to their tracks.
The first two options would require only small changes in the terms of their respective JPAs to serve additional territory, and as the study notes, economies of scale exist when adding rolling stock to an existing service, as the number of necessary spare locomotives and cars does not grow one-to-one.
A key distinguishment between the two options is layover facilities. The Capitol Corridor is able to park trains at their Oakland Maintenance Facility, at Sacramento station, and at the terminus stations in San Jose and Auburn. The Pacific Surfliner parks trains in Los Angeles or their San Diego maintenance facility, plus space at the SLO terminus station for only one train. A project to expand this station’s layover capability was funded in 2023 but will only add a second train parking space and the maintenance capability for that train.
Although the study did not examine the location in detail, a layover facility is needed somewhere on the Coast Rail Corridor, since the length of the corridor will require standby trains, should there be equipment failure or track failure along the route. Ideally, this facility would be centrally located, or as close as practical, within the corridor and still be near its maintenance facility. The Oakland facility is nearer than the San Diego facility, and it would be cheaper to build more layover tracks in SLO than on expensive real estate in the Bay Area. But that’s my speculation.
The long term vision is for every-other-hour trains running up and down the corridor, connecting communities along the coast between the LA and Bay Area mega regions. In terms of equipment necessary, the state DOT could reallocate its common rolling stock from the San Joaquins to the Capitol Corridor, since the San Joaquins is slowly receiving new single-level Siemens Venture cars. With SLOCOG funded for the track improvements, they hope to wrap those up by 2028.
The study – authored in 2021 – originally envisioned new trains on the corridor running in 2027, so assuming the rolling stock becomes available and Capitol Corridor is in a position to operate on the corridor, it’s entirely possible to see new corridor trains by 2030, IMO.
As a side note, the development of the corridor would not only improve connectivity of Central California residents to the Bay Area and SoCal, but also to the Sacramento region. Although the Capitol Corridor does reach Sacramento via the Bay Area, this section is crowded by commuters and the train must navigate the slow curves of San Pablo Bay west of Martinez. From the thumbnail above, someone in SLO might have a quicker journey to Sacramento via Paso Robles and Hanford, bypassing the Bay Area entirely.
The inland town of Hanford is presently served by the San Joaquins but is also home to a future High Speed Rail station, as part of the first operating segment from Bakersfield to Merced. It is reasonably expected that when that high speed section is complete, travelers from the Paso Robles bus can board a high speed train north to Merced, with a cross-platform guaranteed transfer to the conventional San Joaquins train waiting at the station to continue north to its existing destinations of Sacramento or Oakland.
Though as it happens, the San Joaquins itself is pursuing an expansion to the north, beyond Sacramento towards Chico, overlapping communities which are served only by the two one-way Coast Starlight trains. This expansion will use UP’s Sacramento Subdivision that runs north-south.
An odd quirk of Sacramento is that the principal train station sits only on UP’s Martinez Subdivision, which runs west to the Bay Area and east to Reno. The only junction between the Martinez and Sacramento subdivisions is Haggin Junction east of the station. But Haggin is not a complete junction, and northbound traffic on the Sacramento Subdivision must pass north of and then reverse into the junction to enter Sacramento station to the west.
This is not ideal for the San Joaquins northern expansion, and so they’ve decided to outright skip the main Sacramento station in their plans. Accordingly, for someone in SLO heading to Chico, it is indeed more advantageous to travel inland by bus and then train, to avoid the Bay Area congestion and a connection from the Capitol Corridor somewhere in Sacramento. But for a destination east of Sacramento, the Capitol Corridor route would be more advantageous.
No plans exist to upgrade Haggin Junction, nevermind the disruption it would cause to downtown Sacramento. Instead, the transfer to Sacramento station would likely happen from a new San Joaquins station linked to SacRT’s Gold LRT line in Midtown Sacramento.
As for why San Joaquins couldn’t expand operations on their already-occupied Fresno Subdivision and has to build these new stations just to head north, it is because the Fresno Subdivision is at max capacity, and because turning north would require a brief traversal west onto the Martinez Subdivision, until turning north at Haggin Junction. This is too much impact for UP to accept, in addition to wholly bypassing the communities between Lodi and Sacramento which don’t yet have passenger rail service, even though they see freight trains on the Sacramento Subdivision.