Oh, and it turns out that the Coast Starlight does not stop at all of the minor Amtrak stations in the Bay Area, just a few major ones. This is not a problem, as I have looked up how to get to best station of the choices (I chose San Jose over Oakland because it's a better connection on the front end for the con and I assume it's a nicer place to wait at night than Oakland based on nothing other than my vague, poorly-informed, out-of-stater idea that Oakland is not the nicest part of the Bay Area), and it's basically a case of me finding any BART station and taking appropriate trains and buses from there, which does not seem hard to me. (The bus to the train station runs from the Fremont BART station, and two out of the 5 BARTs appear to run there, with reasonably obvious points to transfer to those from the other BARTs.) Of course, I'm trying to plan all of this using the magic of the internet, but it seems like it works the way I want it to and all the transit involved seems to run both late and frequently, so it seems like I should be able to make it work.