San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fast rail? State already has train to nowhere
It has been one of those great California dreams — a train whisking travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes. The trains would go faster than a speeding bullet — 220 mph. Just like trains in advanced countries in Europe or Asia. Even Uzbekistan has highspeed rail.
But it is only a California dream. There were planning problems, legal problems. The cost doubled to $77.3 billion. “Let’s level about the highspeed rail,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in his first stateofthestate speech. “Let’s be real. The current project as planned would cost too much and, respectfully, would take too long.”
Instead of a San FranciscotoLos Angeles line, Newsom is backing the first stage — a 165mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield. Critics called it “a fast train to nowhere.”
To the city elites who run California, the Central Valley really is nowhere. Not a single Michelinstarred restaurant, no bigleague sports teams, no sense of style. Nathan Heller described Merced and Bakersfield in the New Yorker as “two small cities that, it’s fair to say, most coastal metropolitan Californians happily visit rarely or never.”
In fact, the corridor between Merced and Bakersfield is the heartland, the Midwest of California. Just over a million people live between these two communities — a larger population than in six states.
Fresno has 527,438 residents, for example. Bakersfield has 380,874. Taken together, Fresno and Bakersfield have more people than St. Louis and Kansas City combined. That’s some nowhere.
And there already is train service between the Bay Area and Bakersfield — several trains a day, in fact. A typical trip from San Francisco to Bakersfield takes just under seven hours at an average speed of about 50 mph. You might call it the slow train to nowhere.
I’ve ridden Amtrak’s San Joaquin trains several times in the past, so I decided to check it out again last week.
The first thing to remember is that the San Joaquin train doesn’t start in San Francisco. Instead, one takes a bus from the Temporary Transbay Terminal on Howard Street, only a block from the grand new Transbay transit center, built to accommodate highspeed rail, if it ever happens.
The actual train — four cars long — is boarded in Emeryville. It stops in Richmond, where there is an easy BART connection, then runs along the bay shore for miles, past Hercules, Crockett, Martinez and Antioch — the seacoast of Contra Costa County. Then through the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta, clunking over bridges and past houseboats. The train is mostly empty until it stops at the unlovely back end of Stockton, where it gradually fills. The San Joaquin trains are the main lines of the valley.
But they’re slow. The passenger trains have to share the single track BNSF rail line with freight trains — and there are plenty of them. There are also hundreds of highway and road crossings. After two hours and 40 minutes, when the dreamers promised the highspeed train would be in Los Angeles, the slowspeed train is only just south of Stockton. Modesto has a big new rail station and lots of housing. Heading south, the view is mostly of orchards and vineyards. “Travel from a different point of view,” Amtrak calls it.
Just past Madera the train passes bridges and viaducts being built for highspeed rail. One big viaduct is just outside Fresno. Someday trains may cross this viaduct, but now it resembles a futuristic Stonehenge.
I went only as far as Fresno, where the train stops near the landmark Fresno Water Tower. Back again on the northbound train, which was running late. “Rail traffic congestion” was the explanation.
The trains carry about a million passengers a year. They were a mixed bag the other day. Three dozen schoolchildren on a summer field trip, families, single travelers. Manny Vlacakic, a businessman who frequently travels from the Central Valley to San Francisco, was aboard.
“It takes the same amount of time as driving,” he said.
Richard Sax, who takes the train to visit relatives in Porterville (Tulare County), said the train “is fine, though it is often late.”
There was a man named Sean, a firsttime rider. He had just gotten out of Corcoran State Prison, and was headed north for a new life. He’d spent some of his inmate time as a firefighter, making $1 an hour. Everything out the train window looked good to him.
David Garcia, who was having a beer in the cafe car, said he liked the San Joaquin train but didn’t look forward to highspeed rail. “A waste of money,” he said.
The valley once had faster rail service. The Santa Fe railroad advertised a train called the Golden Gate which would “whiz through the beautiful San Joaquin Valley” between San Francisco and Bakersfield in six hours flat — an hour faster than the modern San Joaquin trains.
That was in 1941.