San Francisco Bay Area Intercity Railroading

Introduction

Here is my personal guide to the intercity railroads of the Bay Area, of which there are several, with a long and colorful history. I treat the Bay Area's urban- and suburban-transit railroads in a separate page, as I do places to visit. However, I do cover various rail museums and hobby stores here. Here they are:

National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak)

Old logo:

New logo:

This is the United States's national passenger railroad, formed as a bailout of intercity passenger railroading in 1971, which the various railroad companies had been trying to dump as fast as regulators would let them, since it was a big money-loser. Some railroads, like the Union Pacific and the Santa Fe (now BNSF) had been honorable about keeping high-quality service to the bitter end, but others, like the Southern Pacific were decidedely less-than-friendly (that RR once ran an ad urging people not) to ride its trains). Since then, Amtrak has defied a lot of odds and has not only survived, but also grown in some places. One of them is California, where the state's Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has actively been involved with Amtrak's growth inside of California, to the point of buying new rolling stock and even having its own logo and paint job.

or in ASCII form, 


		  <--
		<-- -->  Amtrak California
		  <--
More seriously, the agency had bought for California service some new locomotives with bullet-shaped noses, and also some new double-decker "California Cars". The latter was plagued with various procurement delays and snafus, and their maker, Morrison-Knudsen, is not likely to make any more of them (after a lot of delays, it backed out of a contract to make some commuter-rail cars). The locomotives are very quiet by locomotive standards, and the windows of the passenger cars are satisfyingly large (there has, however, been some controversy over measures to make them universally accessible to wheelchair-bound people, even at the expense of making the seats [allegedly] too narrow).

Amtrak California trains also have another feature; a heavy use of connector buses ("Ambuses"), to the point that they are almost as abundant in CA as in the rest of the US. These buses go to where rail service has not yet been established (such as between Stockton and Sacramento) or where building speedier rail connections would be very expensive (such as between Oakland and San Francisco, and between Bakersfield and Los Angeles; consider the bodies of water and mountains in the way of construction).

However, that does not mean that there are no Amtrak trains that go to other states; there are several ones that do so, like the California Zephyr and the Coast Starlight from the Bay Area. Their passengers cars are "Superliners", which are double-deckers that are similar to the California Cars, and some of the Superliners are sleepers, so one does not have to sleep in one's seat. All of these trains, however, are reserved; check on Amtrak's Internet site for more details.

The various trains stop at several places in the Bay Area, ranging from various "Amshacks" (not much different from bus shelters) to much fancier structures. Most notable of these are the San Jose Cahill St. station, a nice old (and recently-restored) Mission-style building shared with CalTrain, the new Jack London Square station in Oakland, the new Emeryville station (just north of Oakland), the Richmond station (admittedly not much more than an Amshack, but shared with BART), and the Martinez station (a nice old building). The JLS and Emeryville stations have nice and airy buildings with big glass walls; the JLS station is some blocks south of the downtown-Oakland BART stations, while the Emeryville is accessible by bus from the MacArthur BART station.

All of the Bay Area Amtrak trains run on trackage owned by other railroads; in all of the US, Amtrak only owns a few hundred miles of the 25,000 or so miles that it runs on. The owner of the bulk of this track in the Bay Area is the Union Pacific railroad; the only exception will be noted in the route listings below. Here are the trains' routes; they will all be listed going northward in the Bay Area proper.

Finally, one bit of nice scenery is the Cal-P line between Richmond and Martinez, and a little bit across the river; at least the area is a favorite area for taking pictures of trains in. One will get a great waterfront view across the Bay, and the hills nearby are also nice. The bridge over the San Joaquin River at Martinez has a span in the center that can be raised; I once had to wait several minutes in a Capitol for a ship to pass. Going across the bridge, one will see in the east a big fleet of mothballed ships. Since that place also has some railroad yards and parking lots for cars being delivered somewhere, there are, in effect, three parking lots there -- one for cars, one for trains, and one for ships. And on the subject of movable bridges, there is a rotating-span bridge in Sacramento that is sometimes turned to let tour boats past it; this bridge is part of the Cal-P line.

Union Pacific Railroad

Check out its home page; it is sometimes called "Uncle Pete". In the middle of the 19th century, this railroad and the Central Pacific railroad were chartered to build the famous transcontinental railroad line, from Omaha, NE (its current headquarters) to the Pacific Ocean. The UP got the part from Omaha to near Salt Lake City, UT, while the Central Pacific railroad got the part from SLC to the Pacific Coast, or at least, Sacramento, CA. During the building of that line, the UP got involved with a major scandal, the "Credit Mobilier" scandal, which was about a front company created to help raise funds for construction. Some money got misplaced -- and even embezzled -- along the way, and its collapse produced a major scandal, one that tainted even a Vice President.

However, this railroad, though it got extended to Los Angeles, did not reach the Bay Area until 1984, when it acquired the failing Western Pacific. More recently, in the middle of 1996, it has acquired another failing railroad, the Southern Pacific, and thus the UP now controls the bulk of the intercity and freight railroad trackage in the Bay Area. And with its other acquisitions, it now spans all the US west of the Mississippi River, and it has only one big competitor there, the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, with an equal range.

The merger deal involved some interesting antitrust dealings; some chemical companies in Texas objected that the merger would leave them with only one owner of the railroad lines from them, so this bigger UP had to grant trackage rights to some of its competitors. However, that did not become a big issue in the Bay Area.

I will discuss its trackage in more detail in my discussion of the RR's it had acquired, which are the two next entries on my list; I note that the UP now has no less than three tracks between Oakland and Fremont; the Hayward Line, the Altamont Line, and the Mulford Line. Look for some downgradings or abandonments before too long.

Southern Pacific Railroad

This railroad (or at least predecessors of it at least like the Central Pacific) was the oldest railroad in California, and it had had a long and colorful history, which a century ago had included making enough enemies for it to get called the "Octopus", sort of like the Microsoft of the day. For it, like for many businesses of the day, capitalism was a game to be played to win, no matter what. It was known for charging high rates to those without much competition, and for trying to drive would-be competition out of business with price wars, financed with previously-mentioned high rates for others. It was even known for requesting to see a shipper's books before deciding on what rate to set ("We can't bear for someone to plead poverty when they have plenty of money to spare", perhaps). However, in recent years, it had fallen on hard times and had become very decrepit, prompting it to be nicknamed the "Sufferin' Pacific", and it has now disappeared into the Union Pacific by merger. It has taken a while to completely integrate operations, but the UP's superior resources may be just what the doctor ordered for this sick company.

The idea of a railroad across the continent to San Francisco was hatched by Theodore Judah, whose plans earned him the nickname of "Crazy Judah". He would go on long trips in the Sierra Nevada, surveying in hopes of discovering the most suitable spot to cross these high mountains. He decided on one, the Donner Pass northeast of Sacramento, named after some early explorers who had had the distinction of being reduced to eating some of their fallen comrades during a bad winter there. He managed to interest 4 Sacramento businessmen, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins; who ended up nicknamed "Big Four". They started to raise money for the project, but Theodore Judah decided that they were too crooked, so he decided to go back east to find some investors willing to buy them out. However, he died along the way, and the subsequent behavior of the Big Four seems to have vindicated him. For example, the Federal Government had offered some long-term loans to subsidize this and other western rail projects, but one could qualify more money if one's route was over mountains. So to qualify for the extra money, the Big Four got a geologist to certify that some valley sediments were to be counted as part of the Sierras, because that was where the sediment rock had come from.

The SP had an interesting direction convention: going to San Francisco is "west", while going from San Francisco is "east" -- even on north-south lines; I will ignore this convention here. One interesting question is whether this convention will survive the company's disappearance into the UP.

Also, the SP's long-time headquarters is at One Market Street in San Francisco, near the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero BART/Muni station. However, it got moved to Denver as a result of its merger with the Denver & Rio Grande Western, and with its most recent merger, it is now in Omaha, NE.

Here are its Bay Area lines:

The SP used to have some electric commuter trains in the East Bay, but these, and the overhead cables, are long gone. Its railcars had spent their last years in the remaining Los Angeles Pacific Electric lines, before they were abandoned in the 1950's. The SP had had a pier extending from west Oakland, the Oakland Mole, from where one could catch a ferry to San Francisco. However, it was abandoned when the Bay Bridge was built, and SP's commuter trains went across that bridge instead. The SP had a great competitor here, the Key System, named for the approximate shape of its routes. The Key System had spread over much of the East Bay, and it had had its own pier and ferry to San Francisco. However, in its declining years, it acquired the SP's electric commuter service, and it was finally shut down in 1959, its trains replaced by buses, and these bus lines would ultimately be turned into AC Transit.

The SP had yard acreage at various places in the Bay Area; one big area is in western Oakland, and is readily visible from BART, both south of its Lake Merritt and west of its West Oakland stations. The former area is relatively new, or at least rebuilt; it was built because some of the acreage in the latter area is being taken up by a freeway that is being rebuilt. This freeway is I-980, which collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989; it is being rebuilt in a more circuitous route than formerly, and one that eats up space in the aforementioned yards. West of West Oakland, and to the south, can be seen a locomotive yard, where one can sometimes see locomotives from other railroads, even Conrail (yes, from all the way across the continent).

There are several old stations that are still in existence in various places; here they are:

Western Pacific Railroad

It was built in the first decade of the 20th century as competition for the Southern Pacific. However, it arrived a bit too late, at the trailing edge of the US Golden Age of Railroads. Meaning that it soon got hit with what the rest of the railroad industry got hit by: a double whammy of government-assisted flat-road competition and a regulatory backlash that had resulted from the earlier excesses of the RR business. It was never very successful, and it was eventually bought by the UP in 1984. Supposedly, it could barely keep its locomotives running in its last years.

There is an interesting story about its construction. To make it useful, it had to go to the West Oakland waterfront somehow, where there was deep enough water for ships to dock nearby. However, back when it was built, most of the land on the shores of west Oakland had been owned by its great rival, so the WP guys decided on an interesting end run. They claimed some land that was above water during high tide, even if not during low tide. This land would eventually be used for, among other things, a railcar-ferry dock, to carry its railcars across the Bay to San Francisco, where it had a short line.

Its only current Bay Area line starts in Oakland, runs southward parallel to the BART line, turns east at Fremont at the Niles Junction, and goes north and east and north through Pleasanton, Livermore, Tracy, Stockton, Sacramento, and Oroville, before turning east into the scenic Feather River Canyon to a junction north of Reno ("Reno Junction", of course), continuing eastward from there. That junction has a short branchline that goes into Reno itself. It is sometimes called the Altamont Line, after a place just east of Livermore it runs through.

It has one Bay Area branch off of it, at Fremont, going southward paralleling the SP's Milpitas line to southern San Jose. It had other trackage at various places, near Martinez/Pittsburg and Sacramento, that had belonged to the Sacramento Northern railroad.

Its main line has some street trackage in western Oakland on 3rd St., which sometimes causes rather serious traffic jams; it will not last long since UP now has an alternate route to west Oakland.

It has two surviving Bay Area stations.

There is little, if any, evidence of any other of its stations that had existed in the Bay Area.

Sacramento Northern Railroad

This railroad no longer exists, but once ran from Oakland to Pittsburg and Antioch, with a ferry link to a line to Sacramento and beyond. BART now occupies its right-of-way between Walnut Creek and northern Concord.

Northwestern Pacific / California Northern Railroad

This railroad runs from Marin and Sonoma counties northward to Eureka and Willits, and eastward to the SP's Cal-P line at Fairfield. Its southernmost point is now Novato, with service through Petaluma and Santa Rosa; there are abandoned tracks, trestles, and tunnels to be seen southward, in San Rafael, Corte Madera, Larkspur, and Tiburon. Its southern half was recently owned by the SP, and it is now operated by a short-line company called the California Northern, which also operates on two Central Valley SP routes (Davis-Tehama and Tracy-Los Banos). Its northern half was recently owned by the counties it runs through, though the actual railroading is performed by a private company. However, in the middle of 1996, the two halves were united under new management.

Some old stations survive, such as in Santa Rosa (if I remember correctly). There is the possibility that commuter service may someday be run from Santa Rosa to the Larkspur Ferry Terminal, but there has been little motion on that.

Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad

Here is its home page. This railroad is the result of a recent merger; its Bay Area trackage belonged to the former Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe. This line started out as competition to the Southern Pacific in the Central Valley; it had been known for such shipping-rate policies as charging more to ship from Bakersfield to the Bay Area than to ship across the continent (or at least to Utah, where it met the Union Pacific). What was most curious about this is that former route is mostly straight, is on flatland, and runs through populated areas, while the latter route twists a lot, goes up mountains, and runs through deserts. So some CV businessmen got together and financed what they called the People's Railway; the SP tried to fight it by suddenly lowering its rates, but was restrained by litigation. It is worth noting that these sorts of rate shenanigans, and a lot of scapegoating of the RR industry in general (whether justified or not), led to a backlash of regulation which was ultimately to long outlive its usefulness, setting back the RR industry in comparison to a trucking industry which often did not have to lobby the Interstate Commerce Commission for rate or route changes, as the RR industry had to. The builders of this route eventually sold it to the Santa Fe, under whose ownership the line has been ever since, at least until the merger that formed BNSF.

Its only Bay Area line starts at a yard in Richmond, and goes north and east into Martinez, Pittsburg, Antioch, and Stockton; it approximately parallels the former SP's Cal-P and Mococo lines, being a bit south of the former and a bit north of the latter. From Stockton, it goes near the former SP's Central Valley line all the way to Bakersfield, and shares some trackage with it at least part of the rest of the way to Los Angeles.

There are some impressive steel trestles in the Martinez area; the BNSF line is a bit inland of the coast there. There used to be a line from Richmond going through El Cerrito and Berkeley to Oakland but it is now abandoned. The only surviving Bay Area Santa Fe station that I've ever heard of is the Berkeley one, which I think is now a restaurant.

One part of the UP-SP merger deal was that the BNSF and some other railroads were to get trackage rights on some of this combined railroad's trackage; this is because the two RR's had been competitors in several places and a combination of them would create a local monopoly in several such places.

Tourist Railroads and Railroad Museums

There are several tourist railroads in the Bay Area and nearby, but several of them are in rather rural sorts of areas, and may be difficult to get to without a car.

Railroad-Oriented Hobby Stores

One can buy RR-related stuff at some of the above-mentioned museums, such as the California State Railroad Museum; here are some places where one can get such stuff: There are other Bay Area ones, but this one seems to be the best of them.

Invitation to Readers

I invite all of my readers to write similar files describing railroading and urban transit in the neighborhood of their home towns. Try to give some history, interesting details, curiosities, and so forth. Some details, such as listings of rolling stock, may be dull to many readers; I recommend putting them into other files and referencing them for anyone who would be interested. My pages have been somewhat biased towards railroads that one can ride on, such as urban-transit systems, commuter trains, and Amtrak; others may have other interests.

As to access, I suggest that you put in public-transit access, where it exists; a lot of city centers are not very automobile-friendly, and one can often find parking in transit park-and-ride lots, at least on weekends. Examples of such places are downtown San Francisco and Berkeley; though driving there is far from pleasant, and parking often difficult to find, one can get to both very easily on the transit systems I've described, notably BART, which has an abundance of parking at its suburban stations.

If you can put the information into HTML form, then by all means please do so. Webspace is cheap and easy to get; there are several companies that specialize in web hosting. Try to have a table of contents on your introductory page; and try to put tables of contents on top of longer pages. Cross-referencing, such as what I have done, would also be nice. If you have a lot of big images, you might want to refer to them with a page of descriptions and maybe also thumbnails (very shrunken versions; easy to create with image editors like Photoshop). For real-world images, I recommend JPEG, since it outperforms GIF (more quality for the same compression ratio) for those sorts of images. GIFs are probably OK for thumbnails, however. For diagrams, however, especially those drawn with some computer-graphics program like Adobe SuperPaint, I recommend GIF, since it is both universally viewable and very efficient for that kind of image file.

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