Bay Area marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day with special Caltrain ride

For the first time in three years, Caltrain’s NorcalMLK Celebration locomotive pulled into Diridon Station in San Jose early Monday and carried passengers up the Peninsula into the agency’s San Francisco station.

CalTrain began offering the free, commemorative ride honoring the life and legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1980s. The ride also pays tribute to the 54-mile civil rights protest march activists endured in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

The trip is also Bay Area transit’s homage to the Freedom Train, a three-mile procession Coretta Scott King, King’s late wife, organized in the form of 300 activists marching from Memphis, Tennessee, following King Jr.’s memorial services on May 2, 1968, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The mules and wagons of that first caravan of King’s Poor People’s Campaign drew attention to the injustices of tenant farming, sharecropping and the plantation economy. Marchers then boarded buses en route to Marks, Mississippi. Public transportation agencies nationwide still offer free rides annually to observe the occasion.

CalTrain’s rolling jubilee unfolded as the train departed from Diridon around 9:30 a.m., continued as it stopped in Palo Alto and San Mateo near 9:50 a.m. and 10:10 a.m. respectively and concluded in San Francisco close to 10:45 a.m. on Jan. 16.

The ride was suspended three years ago as the coronavirus pandemic upended public life. But previous rumors of its demise turned out to be exaggerated when this news organization reported the tradition’s finale in 2015. While CalTrain did not offer a special southbound service on the holiday this year, it did accept Celebration Train tickets on southbound trains departing San Francisco after 1 p.m.