[nkoren]

Engineering can easily trump Geography in this case: you could just tunnel under the Golden Gate and keep going north. This would be a utterly trivial compared to something like the Seikan Tunnel[1].

Just to be clear: not knocking Amtrak here. They're virtually budget-less, for the most part disallowed from owning or even maintaining their own infrastructure, so building new infrastructure would be completely beyond the Pale. Not knocking Amtrak at all -- it's America's collective ability to get its infrastructure act together that is just sad.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

[icebraining]

You could also just use the bridge itself. My country has a copy of the Golden Gate (built by the same company) and we've retrofitted it to run trains underneath the deck: https://www.google.com/search?q=ponte+25+de+abril+comboio&tb...

[kingofpandora]

Never heard of this bridge until today. However, according to Wikipedia:

> Because it is a suspension bridge and has similar coloring, it is often compared to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, US. It was built by the American Bridge Company which constructed the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, but not the Golden Gate.

[icebraining]

Oh. My life is a lie :| Thanks, I don't even know where I've heard that. Still, same style of bridge.