As a primer, I highly recommend The Atlantic journalist James Fallows' deep dive, on California HSR:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-cali...

Note: this article contains links to the subsequent articles, which, as of this writing, number 14.

So... what do you do when you arrive in Bakersfield, take a car to LA?

Given current Bay Area rental rates...maybe go home (?)

From the article: "We are talking about a trip from Madera taking 40 minutes to downtown San Jose...." Note: Madera, on the map: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Madera,+CA/

Note: obviously, so much unknown, impossible to say whether 40 minutes represents reality, at this point.

In the '80s I did a back of the envelope calculation on living in Merced and commuting to Silicon Valley.

It looked like that for less than the cost of owning a small house or condo in SV, one could get a big house near Merced, on several acres of land, buy a private plane such as a Mooney M20 (about 50% or more faster than a common Cessna), buy a car to keep in SV at an airport, and pay the operating costs and parking costs and such for the plane and the second car.

That would have given something like a 40-60 minute commute between Merced and an SV office (depending on just where the office was relative to a general aviation airport in SV).

If a train will let one get a similar commute without the need to buy an airplane the numbers will be even more favorable. Madera is not as cheap as Merced, but a quick check on Redfin turns up a lot of houses that are large and almost trivially affordable by even entry level bay area tech workers.