Capitol Corridor

This is, in many instances, primarily a white people train through black people neighborhoods, and has a howl like you would not believe, even now when they supposedly quote-unquote fixed it.

But enough of my opinions on subway systems, this is about DMUs, so where's the DMU on this map? So we're looking primarily at the Contra Costa County area, which in addition to BART actually has a surprisingly good service with the Capitol Corridor, the Amtrak train that runs mostly between Oakland and Sacramento, with a few services a day going south to San Jose and only one a day going past Sacramento to Rockland and Auburn.

But between Sacramento and Oakland, this actually provides a pretty spectacular regional rail function to not just the major cities like Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Davis, and Sacramento, but also some smaller suburban communities in the vicinity of Contra Costa County, such as Richmond, Martinez, and Antioch.

I believe Antioch is an infill station somewhere on here.

And for those taking mass transit this morning, keep in mind.

That Capitol Corridor is not going to serve the Oakland Coliseum Station starting today all the way through January 1st.

This is due to insufficient surrounding lighting.

Plus, Golden Gate Ferry is going to have modified service again this week, including Angel Island, Larkspur, Sausalito, and the Tiburon routes.

There's the Altamont Corridor Express, which goes from San Jose all the way into Stockton and may actually be part of a future expansion of service, the Valley Link, I believe.

You have Amtrak's Capital Corridor, which runs from mostly Oakland to Sacramento and actually kind of provides some local connectivity of its own in the Berkeley area.

VinBart itself also has a weird little extension, which spoilers, we'll be talking about next time.

But what about the poor little North Bay, disconnected from all of this railroad-y glory? Well, for a long time, since at least 2008, they had been planning to build some sort of a local rail system.

But in practice, since the freight activity is a little on the lighter side, they just typically use temporal separation, running the freight trains at night and the passenger trains during the day.

although in theory there are actually a few switching islands that a freight train could hole up in and switch industries during daytime hours without impacting passenger operations.

I will note that since the Brazos branch to Martinez is also owned by Smart, and technically does eventually connect with the Capital Corridor, I think it would be a really fun idea to proto-freelance an extension of Smart that way, because there's a lot more freight activity and it's a lot more centrally located, and it would also provide you the opportunity to have a really fun hyper-freelanced cross-platform transfer between a DMU and a mainline Amtrak train.

In terms of prototype-based layouts, the first concept that comes to mind is a shelf layout centered around the Petaluma area.