My son travels between Fremont and Merced via Stockton. It is bus service between Fremont and Stockton, train service between Stockton and Merced.

Got more detail of the delay for his trip on April 2. He got on the bus at Fremont on time around 3:00PM. Shortly after he left, I got a call from him about bus broke down. They waited at Livermoor for a replacement bus. When they reached Stockton with the replacement bus, the scheduled train just left so he has to wait for the next train. The next train was late for an hour+ when he got on. The story continues that the train had to stop twice on its way due to (1) there was a car stuck on the train track so they needs to wait for the car to be removed (2) the gate at cross road some where does not come down (mechanical problem?) so the train has to stop before the cross road to bring down the gate manually and bring up the gate after passing. When he arrived, it was 11:00PM;-(

It is unfortunate there is one thing after another to cause this major delay but seems these problems are not totally unavoidable. For example, the mechanical problems for bus and signal/gate seems maintenance issue that can be prevented. Beside this major delay, his freqent trips mostly ended up with delay, some up to 3 hours. It is significant delay for a short journey as such.

We also learned (the hard way) that the bus/train is not so reliable so my son never take the last schedule service to prevent from stuck in the train/bus station without connection service. In this case, he missed the schedule train but at least he has the next train to catch. If not, he will be stucked in the train station for over night or call us to drive him back to school.

Thanks for the pointer for train status information lookup. I'll check it out.