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Capitol Corridor success story: Part 1
How California’s Capitol Corridor became one of America’s best rail lines: Part 1 (origins)
The Capitol Corridor passenger-train line, which offers service from San Jose to Sacramento, is exceptional in a lot of ways.
It’s popular. It had the fourth-highest ridership among Amtrak’s state-supported routes in 2023, serving more than 900,000 passengers. It passed the 1 million mark for 2024 in October.
It’s innovative. The Capitol Corridor recently became the first route in the US to implement a “tap-to-ride” payment method, which lets riders pay by holding their credit card or phone to a scanner on board the train.
And it’s reliable. For much of the past 25 years, the system’s on-time rate has been at or above 90 percent, which is about 20 points above average. A 2014 analysis by the Washington Post found that Capitol Corridor had an on-time rate for the previous year of 95%. Only three lines (the Hiawatha, Keystone, and Pennsylvanian) had an on-time rate in the 80s. All others were in the 70s or lower.
Capitol Corridor is an important case study not only because it’s exceptional
It’s important because it began as a very average system.
Like many passenger-train lines in the US, it offered limited and unreliable service when it launched in 1991. The trains were frequently delayed by freight traffic, and there were only three daily round trips.
So it wasn’t obvious that the Capitol Corridor was on its way to becoming one of America’s best rail lines. Yet that’s what happened.
In 2011, the 20th anniversary of its launch, it offered 16 weekday round trips between Sacramento and Oakland, with 14 trains continuing south to San Jose. Ridership had spiked from 293,000 in its first full year to 1.71 million in 2010/11. (Ridership peaked at 1.8 million people in 2019 but declined to less than 500,000 in 2021, the first full year of the pandemic.)
The Capitol Corridor also became dramatically more cost effective.
The share of its operating costs covered by passenger fares rose from 29 percent in the early 1990s to 49 percent in 2011. “This trajectory of growth is the direct result of a carefully developed, customer-focused service delivery plan,” a brochure celebrating the anniversary explained.
In 2012, a writer for the Sacramento Bee described the line’s success in nearly poetic, existential terms: “When so much in life today is so terribly broken—with wars, poverty, ethnic strife, terrorism and more—here is a system that works wonderfully well—financially and environmentally. In such a troubled world, its success is a beautiful thing.” Onboard surveys show that customer satisfaction with the line hovers around 90%.
This three-part series focuses on story of the Capitol Corridor’s “beautiful” makeover, from an average rail system to one of US rail’s notable success stories. Part one focuses on the line’s origins; part two will focus on the sources of its transformation; part three will sum up some key takeaways from the story.
How it all started
In 1990, California voters approved two ballot initiatives—Proposition 116 and Proposition 108—that authorized nearly $3 billion in total new investments, much of which went to rail projects. The Los Angeles Times called it “the most extensive commitments yet to expansion of passenger rail, light rail and subway service in the state.”
This funding allowed Caltrans to invest $85 million in upgrading track and signals between San Jose and Sacramento. (Owned by the now-defunct Southern Pacific at the time, the right of way is currently owned by Union Pacific.) In exchange, Caltrans gained the right to run up to 20 daily round trips in the corridor.
In 1991, Caltrans and Amtrak launched the Capitol Corridor service, starting with three round trips between San Jose and Sacramento. (San Jose was California’s original capital and Sacramento is the current capital—thus the name.) It added a fourth round trip in 1996. But when Caltrans subsequently decided to reduce service in response to low ridership, local stakeholders pushed back.
In 1998, the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA) assumed management of the system. CCJPA is a partnership created by six transportation agencies in the Corridor’s eight-county service area, with a board consisting of elected officials from each agency. In 1999, Eugene Skoropowski became CCJPA’s managing director.
Rather than cutting service, Skoropowski and the CCJPA steadily added it. And the route flourished.
Between 1998 and the mid-2000s, the Capitol Corridor emerged as the West Coast’s version of the Northeast Corridor—a reliable, popular rail line that offers frequent service and is vital to the regional economy.
Ridership tripled, from 463,000 riders in 1998 to about 1.3 million in 2005. And in 2006, CCPJA announced a 33% percent increase in service between Sacramento and the Bay Area/San Jose—from 12 daily round trips to 16. Skoropowski noted that the Oakland-Sacramento segment of the line now represented “the highest level of Amtrak intercity passenger train service outside of the Northeast Corridor.”
Part 2 in this series will focus on the Capitol Corridor’s transformation in this brief window—the late 1990s to the mid-2000s—from the perspective of Skoropowski, the man who presided over it as the CCPJA’s managing director.
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