A Luxury Overnight Train Service from LA to SF Is Underway
Dreamstar Lines’s route will begin summer 2025 if all goes according to plan.
For decades, travelers have been praying for a more pleasant way to get from LA to San Francisco. Hope once lay in the California High-Speed Rail project, authorized in 2008, which still maintains its promise to get people from place to place in under three hours. But as of 2024, that project only just completed its first phase of construction and won’t be finished until 2030 at the earliest.
The dream isn’t dead yet, though. Newport Beach-based startup Dreamstar Lines plans to develop an overnight train service between LA and SF. The new service would be a game changer for travelers, with luxury lodgings like first-class suites with private bedrooms and bathrooms, as well as standard cars (with bedrooms), lounges, and bars. Instead of losing an entire day to traffic on the highway or schlepping all the way to and from the airport for a mere one hour flight, Dreamstar Lines’s innovation could make the laborious journey not only easy but enjoyable.
Dreamstar Lines’s service harkens back to the Southern Pacific Company’s Lark train, a glamorous and beloved overnight passenger route that took an average of 23 hours to move between LA and SF through much of the 20th century. By the 1960s, though, ridership had dwindled, and the Lark had its last service in 1968. Today Amtrak only offers a similar route during the day, which takes anywhere from nine to thirteen hours. While it’s unclear how long Dreamstar Lines’s proposed service will take, the goal is to give passengers as comfortable an experience as possible, allowing them to fall asleep in one city and wake up in the other.
Dreamstar Lines is currently negotiating with Union Pacific, Metrolink, and Caltrain. The company also recently hired a firm, Designworks, to design the ritzy train cars. If all goes according to plan, the overnight service could begin as soon as Summer 2025.