Interurban

Started: 2023-02-22 21:54:39

Submitted: 2023-02-23 21:55:55

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Taking the train to Sacramento

For President's Day weekend, I got the bright idea to take the train to Sacramento to visit the state railroad museum. Sacramento is on the other end of the Capitol Corridor, an interurban service funded by Caltrans and operated by Amtrak, running multiple trains per day, three hours in each direction. Kiesa liked the idea of taking the train (especially that she could read on the train while the scenery rolled by outside), so we settled on a one-night out-and-back, departing on Saturday and returning on Sunday.

Our nearest passenger rail terminal is San Jose-Diridon, inconveniently located across the mountain from us. (We could have bought connecting bus service to Santa Cruz, but the idea of riding a bus across highway 17 was not particularly appealing, though I probably should try it someday.) Getting across highway 17 proved more of an adventure than I expected. We left early enough to allow more than an hour to get across the mountain before our train left San Jose at 13:05. (The drive is nominally 35 minutes, if one doesn't encounter traffic.)

During the winter storms last month several cars had gone over the embankment on the side of the road, and this was the day the highway patrol was going to close one lane of traffic and hoist the wrecked cars up the embankment and back down the mountain. This triggered a traffic delay large enough that Google Maps thought I should take the old Santa Cruz highway (still open as a rough two-lane road) across Summit Road, bypassing all of the traffic. This seemed too good to be true (it's not clear that Google Maps takes into account all of the people who will take the alternate route suggested, and sometimes the route is not a suitable substitute), but I knew the roads in this part of the Santa Cruz Mountains well enough that I thought we could give it a shot.

I turned onto Old Santa Cruz Highway just as traffic was beginning to slow on highway 17, and I kept waiting to hit the crowd of people diverted from the main highway, but I only saw a couple of other cars (most of which did seem to be diverted from the normal northbound traffic across the mountain). The road started rough, winding through the redwood trees on either side of Summit Road, then descended into the valleys on the north side of the mountain before we turned back onto highway 17. (I had driven some of this road before, but not all of it.)

One problem with using San Jose-Diridon as our base of train operations is that the station is owned and operated by Caltrain, which maintains a large surface parking lot for daytime commuters, not overnight travelers. Amtrak has a small parking lot at the south side of the station, but to use it one has to ask at the Amtrak ticket window for a parking pass. I saw some conflicting information online about whether passengers on Capitol Corridor trains could use the parking lot, but I asked and the ticket agent gave me a parking pass and all was well.

We reached the Capitol Corridor platform, #2, with plenty of time to spare before the train departed. Our train was waiting at the platform (three coach cars and a cafe car, pushed by a diesel engine), but the doors were not yet open for boarding so we waited on the platform until the train doors opened.

The train left right on time at 13:05. We headed north, pushed by the diesel locomotive behind us, through the first Santa Clara station, then turned to the east on a single track through industrial Santa Clara, past Levi's Stadium and onward through Alviso and the salt marshes at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. I picked a four-seat table on left side of the train as it traveled north (which had been facing the platform as we boarded) so we could have a better view of the bay as we passed.

We rolled up the Coast Subdivision at the edge of the bay, at the interface between the salt marshes and the barely-developed industrial areas on the other side of the tracks, interrupted by the occasional landfill (accompanied by a field full of curbside solid waste bins), gradually transitioning into the highways and offices and houses of the east bay. When we saw the bright white salt piles at the Cargill salt plant in Newark, I pointed them out to Calvin, who was fascinated by the idea of drying out ocean water and extracting the salt (along with the obvious question, which I could not answer, about how they kept the salt apart from the mud at the bottom of the ponds).

We turned east along the Niles Subdivision, cutting across the main axis of the East Bay, perpendicular to the main highway and rail lines. The train stopped in Fremont, then looped around a water diversion structure at the mouth of Niles Canyon before turning north again, right under the foothills at the edge of the East Bay suburbs. The track straightened out again, and we hit 79 miles per hour on long stretches on our way out of Hayward and into Oakland.

I took this train route one time before, on Memorial Day 2021, on my first trip out of the house after my COVID-19 shots. On that trip I disembarked at Jack London Square; this time we stayed on the train to continue north, past the Port of Oakland, flanked by rail yards and highway overpasses, with encampments of unhoused people filling whatever space they could. We rolled past Ikea and Target into Emeryville, past the little station serving as the western terminus of the California Zephyr, and on past Berkeley. I caught a glimpse of San Francisco Bay bisected by bridges, with the sun reflecting off the sparkling water. At Richmond, the conductor announced the station as our last opportunity for "Bay Area Rapid Transit", and I wondered if that's the full name that BART's parent calls when they're mad at BART.

Past Richmond the track returned to the edge of the water, giving us a view of San Pablo Bay stretching off in the hazy distance to Marin County. For much of the ride my kids seemed more interested in their electronic devices than the exciting scenery we were passing, but at least I appreciated the unique view of the bay, in between the oil refineries dotting the shore.

The tracks turned east to run along the south side of the Carquinez Strait, past the twin bridges carrying I-80 over the strait. Immediately under the bridges was a C&H sugar factory; the old brick building looked like it was maintained well so it must still be in use. Next to it was what looked like a newer industrial facility, dominated by stainless steel vats and pipes.

We stopped in Martinez, then crossed the Carquinez Strait on a double-track steel truss rail bridge nestled between two bridges carrying I-680 over the strait. On the north side of the strait I pointed out the docks carrying cars that had just been unloaded from ships, and the remains of the mothball fleet in Suisun Bay.

After two hours on the train we traversed the Bay Area and emerged in the delta, at the edge of the central valley. The tracks traversed sloughs and marshes at the edge of the water, where it wasn't quite clear where the land ended and the water began (in part because the boundary changed with the tide). We stopped at the outskirts of Suisun/Fairfield, and again in Davis, then crossed the Yolo Bypass. Traffic was slow on the causeway carrying I-80 over the bypass, but our train cruised over the flat terrain at 79 miles per hour.

We pulled into Sacramento Valley Station right on time, just over three hours after we left San Jose-Diridon. We exited the train onto a big new platform that turned out to be a lengthy walk from the terminal, across a field that cut through the old train platforms right in front of the terminal.

We emerged into Sacramento in the late afternoon and found our way into Old Sacramento via an awkward walk through a parking garage tucked under I-5. We walked past the railroad museum, foretelling our visit there the following day, and stopped to look at some of the rolling stock on static display outside.

We walked a block along the Sacramento River, then found ourselves in the middle of a loud outdoor party. The old wooden sidewalks were crowded with people, and the cars and motorcycles that were allowed onto the crowded streets blared music and engine noise. This was not the quaint (but still kind of tourist-trap) Old Sacramento experience I was going for. I eventually saw a sign that explained the event as Mardi Gras, which made sense, but didn't improve my experience.

We found a less-noisy bench to look for supper and found a ramen place in downtown Sacramento, back on the other side of the freeway. This involved figuring out how to get back under the freeway on foot without navigating the parking garage again. The parking lot that looked like our next obvious choice had been taken over by a Mardi Gras festival, but then we found the pedestrian underpass on K Street that took us through an open-air mall past Golden 1 Center (which was overrun by an entirely different crowd, which appeared to be entirely parents with preschool kids, following a Disney on Ice performance), and finally to Kodaiko Ramen. We had to wait for a table, but they had several different selections of veg ramen and the one I ate that involved mushrooms was very good.

After eating we caught a Lyft to our hotel, across the American River in the suburban Natomas neighborhood, where we found a room big enough for the family. We watched a movie (once I figured out that I had to plug my laptop into the TV in order to get volume control, because my iPad decided that it wanted to let the TV control the volume but the TV locked us out of the volume control because it expected us to use their set-top box) and settled in for the night.