page_title: Downtown Rail Extension
section_title: Southern Pacific plans
hierarchical_section_title: Downtown Rail Extension / History / Southern Pacific plans
caption_attribution_description: English: Page 61. Caption: "Rear elevation, showing court and wings, Southern Pacific Office Building, San Francisco."
context_page_description: The Downtown Rail Extension is a planned second phase of the San Francisco Transbay Transit Center. When complete, it will extend the Caltrain Peninsula Corridor commuter rail line from its current northern terminus at 4th and King via a 1.3 mi tunnel. The new terminus will be close to the Financial District and will provide intermodal connections to BART, Muni, Transbay AC Transit buses, and long-distance buses. In addition, the California High Speed Rail Authority plans to use DTX and the Caltrain-owned Peninsula Corridor for service on the CHSRA San Francisco–San Jose segment. Because DTX uses a long tunnel, current diesel locomotives are not suitable and the Caltrain Modernization Project, which includes electrification of the line and acquisition of electrified rolling stock, is a prerequisite.
  Estimated at $6 billion, it is projected to cost more than the entire first phase of the Transit Center. Only the "train box", the structural shell surrounding the lowest level of the TTC, has been funded as part of Phase 1 construction. As of 2018, full funding has not been obtained for the entire Phase 2 project.
context_section_description: Starting in 1909, SP purchased sixteen complete blocks in a direct line between the foot of Market and the existing Third and Townsend depot at a cost of $5 million (equivalent to $99.1 million in 2018), and the San Francisco Call believed this meant a station uniting SP with the Santa Fe and Western Pacific near the San Francisco Ferry Building was imminent. In 1911, SP purchased a key property which had previously housed a home for war veterans, and the San Francisco Call again speculated SP would shortly build a new depot at Market and Beale. When the new Third and Townsend Depot was announced in November 1912, Charles S. Fee, SP passenger traffic manager, denied the prior rumors putting a new depot at Market and Beale, saying the Ferry Building would be handling the bulk of the traffic and that a Market and Beale station could not be completed in time for Panama–Pacific service.
  The San Francisco Chronicle speculated that Third and Townsend could have been announced as a bargaining tactic to knock down the asking price of the few landowners remaining between the existing station and Market and Beale. However, other observers understood the 1914 Spanish Revival Depot at Third and Townsend was intended as a "temporary" structure since SP planned to extend service to downtown San Francisco at some point in the future, as shown by the configuration of the new Southern Pacific General Office building at 1 Market Street. That building was completed in 1917 with an "E"-shaped floor plan, and Southern Pacific had retained tenancy of the first-floor spaces facing the "courtyard", implying that a ground-floor courtyard station space may have been planned for the future, but plans to extend the rails into downtown San Francisco were put on hold following the United States's entry into World War I and were never revived.
  In 1955, the California Public Utilities Commission published a report to evaluate SP's Peninsula Commute service in the wake of a 1950 application to raise fares. The report noted "While the Peninsula Service furnishes a rapid rail transportation, particularly during morning and evening peak periods, it does not carry passengers within reasonable walking distance of downtown San Francisco" and "a considerable portion of the commuter's total traveling time is spent in transit between the S. P. Depot and downtown San Francisco, and at an additional expense to the commuter of 30¢ a day." By counting passengers who disembarked at 3rd and Townsend, the report concluded that 70% of passengers disembarking in San Francisco used Muni to reach their final destination, and the time spent on Muni could equal or exceed the time spent on SP's trains.
caption: "Courtyard" of the 1917 Southern Pacific Building at One Market Street in San Francisco
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