Slow choo choo to LA

After getting up early and taking the Bus to BART, and BART to Oakland, I walked down to Jack London Square to catch the Amtrak train, the Coast Starlight, from Oakland down to LA. It was supposed to be a 12 hour trip (contrasted with the 5 1/2 – 6 hour drive), and I’d hoped for some scenic views and a relaxed ride. The thing is, the reason it takes so long is that they go really slow. Add to that they had some track difficulties down south so they were constrained to a single track. This meant two things: we had to wait twice on sidings for more than an hour each to let northbound trains go past, and we had to stop at a bunch of extra stops to pickup and let off passengers from trains which were prevented from coming up. As a consequence we were almost 2 1/2 hours late getting into LA (making it a 14 hour trip). There was some nice scenery, and we actually went past a major fire as we got down into the LA area, but having done the train once I can check it off my list and plan to drive in the future.