Sorry this is kind of a crossover Guest Rewards/Trip Report thread with a little Commuter Rail/Subway/Light Rail too
I ended up using a portion of the rewards trip. I decided to stop for lunch in Fresno, so I bought another ticket to Fresno and got some more points. So the EMY-->FNO portion of my rewards ticket went unused, and no big deal, it was free.
The timetable between southbound 712 and 714 allows for a nice lunch stopover in Fresno, the Paris of the Central Valley. You arrive at 11:35 and depart on the next train at 2:10. I took note of the Madera station when we stopped, which was pretty much agreed to be the worst Amtrak station of all in
this thread here.
Fresno was about 100 and Bakersfield was about 110. We're having a long summer. The Thruway bus connections were all on time. In LAUS I saw a nice new police car for Amtrak Police "Protecting a Nation in Transit" but then I thought it was kind of sad that the police car was much newer and nicer than the old Thruway bus.
I had my first experience riding the L.A. subway. Why does L.A. have "Metro Rail" and "Metro Link"? That is so confusing. You would think with all the creative types in L.A. they could come up with better names than that! The color coded names for L.A. subway lines can't last. Eventually they are going to run out of colors. Aqua line? Fuchsia? Indigo? A whole Crayon set! Plus some people are color blind. In the bay area we don't say "take the Red line" we say "take the Richmond train". In New York they have letters and numbers. Boston has color codes though. But Boston isn't building a lot of new subways either. Hmm...I suppose this is an endless discussion.
Heading back up north I rode 715 all the way to Emeryville and took the bus connection to San Fran. It was Friday night and the train was packed. There was a line in the cafe car almost the whole time.
The train was a bit late getting to EMY and so the bus connection to San Fran was late too. Previous times when I took this connection I got off at the first stop, but this time I wanted to go to 4th and Market. The first stop was Financial Dist., and I realized soon after I should have hopped off there and walked. The bus takes forever to navigate around downtown San Francisco. The driver actually went back to the Ferry Building twice because a passenger didn't get off the first time. The passengers who wanted to make a Caltrain connection were getting anxious. Thank goodness he didn't go to Fisherman's Wharf as nobody was ticketed for there. It probably took me an hour to get from Emeryville to 4th and Market. Afterward I thought it was a bit odd that Amtrak provides this highly inefficient form of local transit in downtown San Francisco.
