Philly Amtrak Fan
Engineer
I totally understand that the service yard is in Oakland and I get it. I just wanted to point out I have a feeling people think San Jose is a suburb of San Fran and Oakland when in fact it is a city of over 1 million people. Historically San Fran and Oakland were the big cities in the Bay Area but the South Bay/Silicon Valley is pretty big now. It's probably like Baltimore to Washington (40 miles on Silver Star/Meteor routes). You may think that San Fran and Oakland are close enough to San Jose but San Jose and Santa Clara may disagree with you.Just guessing here, but I imagine there is far more support for (and therefore benefit from) beefing up Capitol Corridor service, so that there are approximately the same number of trains SJC-OKJ as there are OKJ-SAC than there is for using one of those slots for the California Zephyr instead.
And that still doesn't solve the issue of the train being serviced in Oakland.
In a related topic, does anyone ever complain Amtrak should serve Phoenix? Well Maricopa is closer to Phoenix than San Jose is to Emeryville.
(https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Phoenix,+AZ/Maricopa+Amtrak,+Maricopa,+AZ+85139/@33.2525392,-112.1523286,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x872b12ed50a179cb:0x8c69c7f8354a1bac!2m2!1d-112.0740373!2d33.4483771!1m5!1m1!1s0x872afad2d62707d3:0x58723f3934f8517!2m2!1d-112.047137!2d33.056284)
Do you feel Maricopa is good enough for Phoenix? So maybe Emeryville/Oakland isn't good enough for Silicon Valley. I'll admit the solution is difficult and expensive but I think if you just dismiss it as not being a problem you then are saying San Jose doesn't matter.