Coast Starlight discussion 2023 Q4 - 2024

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The convention with the Coast Starlight is odd number is southbound - 11. Northbound has always been 14. At one time, the train was known internally as 12 & 13 south of Oakland.
Yeah, when trains ran with timetable authority in timetable and train order operation, the railroads generally kept the train numbers the same in the authoritative employee timetables as in Amtrak’s public timetables after Amtrak renumbered trains into its own system in late 1971.

All trains on the SP ran either westward towards San Francisco or eastward away from San Francisco. Since the Starlight ran past San Francisco, it could not retain the same SP train number for its whole run. So the southbound Starlight was SP 11 "westward" from Portland to Oakland and SP 12 "eastward" from Oakland to LA. The northbound Starlight was SP 13 "westward" to Oakland and SP 14 "eastward" to Portland. I think it was BN 1011 and 1014 between Portland and Seattle, but am far from sure of that. After the train went daily Amtrak didn't really use 12 and 13 for anything, to Amtrak it was just 11 and 14. It was an SP operational thing and T&E crews were SP for most of the period until timetable and train order operation was discarded.

The short lived Spirit of California was similar, with Amtrak train numbers 15 and 18. It was SP 15 Sacramento-Oakland, SP 16 Oakland-LA, SP 17 LA-Oakland and SP 18 Oakland-Sacramento.

I seem to recall that someone here said Amtrak recycled numbers 12 and 13 for some NEC train at some point.

Fun fact, the early version "Coast Daylight/Starlight" that only ran north of Oakland triweekly was initially 98-11 and 99-12 before Amtrak renumbered it out of SP assigned train numbers, since it was pretty much running the Coast Daylight (98/99) and Cascade (11/12) schedules.

Railroads moved away from timetable and train order dispatching in the mid 1980s and employee timetables now have no trains in those timetables.
 
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I was looking at the Coast Starlight on November 16th and 17th and it is listed as "sold out" in both directions between LA and Martinez, as far as I can tell. Could this be a track maintenance thing? I don't see something listed in the official service alerts section.
Yep. Looks like 14 is only running EMY-SEA that weekend
 
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