I once took the "Coast Ghost" from Glendale to Sacramento to attend a Jim Evans union soiree of some kind. It was competitive with air and a room (fly up and be there in the morning) from a cost perspective, but the fares for coach seemed very high, the service poor, and the marketing was even poorer. Amtrak didn't like it that much either, because some perceived that it competed with and confused customers of their "premier" service on the "daylight" departing Coast Starlate.

Running time up the Coast has always been a problem and not much has improved with a 100 miles of slow orders on bad but often perfectly tangent track designed for 79 mph, and potentially capable of 110 through parts of the Salinas Valley.

I would suspect that a train like that serving UCSB, Cal Poly, Stanford, SFSU and Cal students today would do much better, with the rewards and marketing program. It also fills a gap in later night departure on LOSSA6N and could provide an early service from Monterey County into the SFO/OAK market.

The line is a mess, but my old pal Neil Petersen once put together a scheme to get this line down to about a 6.5 hour schedule for about $3 billion, in early nineties dollars, and
Anschutz offered then to sell it to the State for about a billion. Like fools the State said no....

Why would we want a train line for only a billion when we have the 101 to park on.