THE RETURN OF THE LARK.

A company called Dreamstar proposes to operate a sleeping car service between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Dreamstar co-founders Joshua Dominic and Thomas Eastmond say the company’s discussions with Union Pacific were restarted last year after initial talks in 2018.

“We have provisionally identified terms for track access payments that will work for both of us,” they write. Regarding liability insurance, they say, “UP requires roughly the amount of the statutory cap on passenger rail damages. Our broker has sourced the necessary insurance stack; the premium isn’t cheap but fits within our model.”

Dominic, the company CEO, says in the release, “Dreamstar officials expressed their appreciation towards their counterparts at Union Pacific,” adding, “We’ve been really impressed with their willingness to think creatively about how we can work together for the benefit of both our companies and the public.”

The memorandum of understanding follows UP’s cooperation with another private operator, Rocky Mountaineer, on the Colorado route that also hosts Amtrak’s California Zephyr. Like UP’s Coast Line that Dreamstar would utilize, it is not a main freight corridor, and thus has extra capacity and scheduling flexibility to handle a passenger train making a leisurely trip.

That other train is an excursion to Moab, Utah, somehow a tourist destination again (once upon a time Union Pacific ran trains that served several national parks and monuments but using its own tracks) reached from Denver over former Rio Grande lines now hosting relatively few freight trains, and the proposed overnight train would use the San Francisco station mostly used by commuter trains these days, and the Coast Line, no longer a freight main even during sugar beet season, from San Jose into Los Angeles.

Dreamstar is also “working toward an agreement” with Metrolink, a tenant at Los Angeles Union Station, and Caltrain, which would afford access directly to downtown San Francisco. This would enable Dreamstar to recreate the overnight “downtown-to-downtown” convenience of Southern Pacific’s Lark that operated until April 1968.

We'll see whether a rolling upscale hotel is a meaningful value proposition in California.  If we had a bracket for Passenger Rail projects, I pick this one to turn a wheel before California's environmentally and politically hampered high speed rail project does.  "One small step in the right direction would be for Washington to stop bilking taxpayers for the sake of rail projects that might never be completed, let alone come close to being worth the cost."