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The following year, Amtrak launched an agreement with Greyhound allowing for passengers to buy combined bus and rail tickets for connecting services run by the two companies. These services were the predecessors of Thruway Motorcoach. The first Amtrak bus service to bear the name "Amtrak Thruway" was launched in California in 1993. [2]
The Highway 17 Express is an Amtrak Thruway route provided by a consortium of entities that provides regional service between San Jose and Santa Cruz County in the South Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. The service is so called because it travels on California State Route 17. It is operated by the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District.
During the 1970s Amtrak operated the Coast Starlight, which departed Los Angeles every morning for Seattle, Washington. The southbound Coast Starlight arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the morning and in Los Angeles by dinnertime, and at the time did not serve Sacramento, the state capital. [1] [2]: 50
The plan would increase the coverage of the long-distance Amtrak network by 23,200 route miles, reaching an additional 45 million population, 61 metropolitan statistical areas, 24 congressional districts, twelve National Park Service sites, and two states (Wyoming and South Dakota). Another round of public input will take place before the final ...
[54] [55] However, the cash-strapped railroad would ultimately build relatively few of these standard stations. [56] An Amtrak EMD SDP40F with the San Francisco Zephyr in 1975. By the mid-1970s, Amtrak equipment was acquiring its own identity. Amtrak soon had the opportunity to acquire rights-of-way.
The Amtrak Thruway Highway 17 Express service between Santa Cruz and San Jose started as an emergency bus service after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake closed Highway 17. A strike in September 2005 lasted for 35 days and stranded up to 23,000 riders. [4] In 2011 fixed route service was severely cut then restored mere months later. [5]
Eventually, however, after several false starts, Amtrak consolidated the two trains into one, dubbed the San Francisco Zephyr, homage to both the California Zephyr and the San Francisco Chief, between Chicago and Oakland. The Rio Grande continued to operate the Rio Grande Zephyr between Denver and Ogden. [8]: 136–137
On May 1, 1971, Amtrak took over all long-distance inter city passenger operations in the United States, discontinuing the MILW-UP-SP City of San Francisco. Amtrak retained the name for the thrice-weekly Denver–San Francisco/Oakland portion of the run until June 1972, when the entire Chicago-San Francisco/Oakland route became daily again as ...