While I hope UTC will end up with a HSR station, it’s where I work and is a center of Banking/Finance and biotechnology industries, the Q alignment is a reasonable alternative that should generate as much, if not more, ridership.

I agree with a prior commenter that a Lindbergh location is just about as convenient to downtown – many downtown residents would take the trolley to Santa Fe, as the station is at a far end of downtown. So what is the problem with taking the trolley two or three more stops to Lindbergh? Lindbergh probably has a slight edge over Santa Fe for people living in the rest of the urban core. For tourists and business visitors I suspect Lindbergh would be better. Frankly if there is to be a second station, Qualcomm would probably be better situated for suburban populations than University City, which is heavily congested with traffic, and not well-served by public transportation. Also the business districts around University City are very spread out, and the projected trolley line to UTC won’t serve the large developments north of University City. (My company recently moved from downtown to University City, and I live near downtown, so my knowledge of this part of the city has unfortunately greatly increased lately.)

You will probably get plenty of NIMBYism for the 56 corridor though the ROW would be available there. I was surprised the 52 wasn’t considered – good ROW there too, more heavily developed but frankly less affluent so possibly less likely to complain? Sorry to be a cynic there. Either the 15 or the 163 to the 8 make a lot of sense, the 163 bypasses Qualcomm but would involve less landtaking along the 8, which is going to be a problem – also the 8 follows the San Diego River, and when they built the trolley line there, there huge environmental controversies, so expect more wetlands issues if they try to build a giant train line there. The mayor wants to build a new football stadium downtown, if that were to happen, I don’t know whether the Qualcomm location would be better or worse – it would be a major site for redevelopment, probably with a focus on medium-density housing, and possibly a major satellite campus of SDSU. And though I am loathe to say this, if HSR terminated at Qualcomm, it wouldn’t be a crisis. It has good public transportation service, excellent freeway access, room for train parking (I don’t know how they’ll resolve that downtown), and room for automobile parking as well. If there were stations at Qualcomm and Lindbergh/Santa Fe, Qualcomm would be the choice of most suburban users – and remember, San Diego is mostly suburb.

Still can’t move the convention center.

Anyway just so you know the Coronado Ferry no longer exists. Sad but true, it was deemed a security threat to North Island Naval Base as one reason to shut it down.

Anyway, my claim of the four track sections being about a mile comes from this document, which specifies a total 6000′ length for the four track section (including switches). You mention that the express train has to be at least 5 minutes behind the local. This seems quite logical, since you would want the express to be following the local as close as possible so that the local doesn’t have to wait in the station for minutes on end for the express to pass.

For the linear programming optimization station skipper schedule, you get more or less what the CHSRA gets.

For regular schedules, I don’t see more express SF/SJ/LA services than all-stations and limited stops services to the Bay and Sacramento combined. The SF/SJ/LA express services may be the first to get longer and then bi-level trains, but given the capacity and the benefit of frequency, I’d expect whichever operator leases the run from CHSRA will have trains with Fresno and Bakersfield stops in addition to the all-stations through the CV.