As you may know, there are a variety of passenger trains rolling throughout Southern California: Metrolink in the L.A. metro area, the Coaster and Sprinter in San Diego County and Amtrak, the national railroad connecting cities in California to the rest of the U.S.
The four different railroads have historically each maintained their own timetables, making it tricky for Jane Citizen to quickly figure out what might be the quickest or most convenient way to take a train from here-to-there.
To remedy that issue, the Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo Rail Corridors Agency has created a timetable that covers all four railroads. Neat idea, people! Outside of transit circles, the agency is a bit obscure but their core mission is easy to understand: improve regional rail service.
Here’s the new timetable (pdf download here) with a hat tip to Dana Gabbard at L.A. Streetsblog:
They still need to work on a few things with the timetable.
As for fares. Im not sure amtrak would go with it.
Amtrak, Caltrans and Metrolink has let Rail2Rail die.
Well this is great! Looks better than my homemade compiled schedules. It’s so much cheaper (than Amtrak to travel LA-SD) to get a Metrolink weekend pass and then take the Coaster from Oceanside. I wish that weekend pass were valid on Amtrak!!!
I’m all for interagency cooperation when they find such to be beneficial, but the last thing we need is micromanagement from Sacramento. Let Governor Brown and the General Assembly get their own house in order before they start dictating fares to LACMA, Metrolink and Muni agencies.
You can take the train from New York to Philadelphia by taking two commuter trains. You take New Jersey Transit’s train from New York to Trenton. You make an across the platform transfer and take SEPTA’s train from Trenton to Philadelphia. You save a bundle on train fare, and you can choose from multiple stations, especially in Philadelphia and nearby. It’s two separate fares, but the schedules of the trains are coordinated. I’ve always hoped that the Coaster and Metrolink could be scheduled to meet each other in Oceanside.
This is a very handy tool, but the title is somewhat deceiving. “Southern California Passenger Rail SYSTEM MAP and TIMETABLES” implies that it includes timetables for all of the routes shown on the system map. Instead, it only shows the timetables for the routes serving the LOSSAN Corridor. The title should be “Southern California Passenger Rail SYSTEM MAP and LOSSAN Corridor TIMETABLES”. (Also, it would be nice if they could show the LA Metro light rail lines, but I understand that LA Metro didn’t contribute to this product.)
This is a work in progress and I am sure it will be updated and improved over time. And it is a decent starting point, in my view.