jis
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Why? That will mean stationing a person in San Jose to couple/uncouple cars, it will require the same staff on train as would be required to just run the train to San Fran (except one additional engineer). And somehow these cars will have to be switched from the south of the train to the north end of the train in San Fran requiring a person to be stationed there to couple and uncouple cars and shuffle them around, and an Engineer to stick around to do yard work. Why bother? Just run the Amtrak California train to San Fran. Even if you are running it from San Diego, one can always figure out a link that terminates the consist in LAX to send it for servicing. All this is not rocket science. Really.Since Caltrain pushes into San Fran why not couple any SAN cars south of the loco ?
Ideally it should go to Oakland and let passengers connect at San Jose to Caltrain. But if one must send it to San Fran, it is doable with some additional effort. Clearly if there is a bad ordered car discovered at San Fran then it will have to be switched with the help of Oakland.Then the Amtrak equipment becomes orphaned in San Fran, so to speak. There' s no maintenance base for Amtrak there. Going to Oakland is a better operation, for that reason, but only for that reason. If a piece of equipment has to be taken out of service, it would be much better to do that at the Oakland terminus, don't you think?
The Amtrak equipment gets exactly as orphaned in San Fran as say the Vermonter gets orphaned in St. Albans or the Empire Service trains get orphaned in Niagara Falls, or the Palmetto gets orphaned in Savannah. It is not that big a deal.
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