Should there be special trains for Oakland Raiders games?

Recently, I’ve been wondering - maybe Amtrak California, Caltrain or ACE should/could offer special trains for Oakland Raiders games - now that the new Oakland Coliseum station is open? There don’t seem to be any convenient trains for a Sunday 1 pm game time right now - coming from San Jose, one has to take either train 728 arriving at 10:39 am or train 734 arriving at 1:38pm. The first one is way too early and the second one too late for the game. For people wanting to go to a game, there should be a train departing San Jose at around 11:30am, arriving 12:30pm at the Coliseum.

Equipment can’t be a big issue - especially for Caltrain, since they must have quite a few trainsets idling in San Jose on weekends.

Update: I meant for any of these three operators to run San Jose-Coliseum trains (I’m sure some deal could be worked out if all are willing). I figured that maybe Capitol Corridor might want to do the trains but not have any equipment and therefore go and borrow them from Caltrain or something like that.

And yes, maybe ACE could actually do Stockton - Coliseum. That would be an idea as well.

Posted in: Uncategorized | August 4, 2005 11:33 am

3 Comments »

lazytom, on August 4, 2005 @ 12:47 pm

Gregg Baxter, Director of Operations for ACE, responds with the following:

Unfortunately we do not have trackage rights to operate to the Coliseum to
go the Raiders Game. Since this is a normal route for the Capitol Corridor
it would be best to discuss expanded service with them.

lazytom, on August 5, 2005 @ 3:55 pm

Caltrain says “Caltrain operates trains on the Peninsula only and has no traffic rights in the East Bay.”

lazytom, on August 5, 2005 @ 4:20 pm

I think this is one of the problems with trains in this country … there’s lots operators everywhere, but most of them are limited in scope and can only run from A to B. So it appears that the only one that would be allowed to run these trains would indeed be Amtrak.

This is silly, isn’t it? If I wanted to charter a bus to go from A to B, there would be no problem, since roads are public and everybody can go whereever he/she wants. But the railroads (most of them) are privately owned, so somebody can’t just run a train.