A Train Thread

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The Capitol Corridor trains had 1,523,630 boardings last year, and are on track to meet or exceed 1.7 million boardings this year.

(My dirty little secret for saving money to the bay area is to fly to Sacramento and take the capitol corridor to SFO. It takes longer, but that doesn't bother me, as I enjoy the ride. Seating can be quite tight, depending on the time of day)

As I understand it - and I very well may have this wrong, as I am not a foamer - is that the efficiency of a locomotive depends on how they are configured. Freight engines are set up to carry huge loads at a slower speed. Passenger locomotives are set up for lighter loads at higher speeds.
 
The Capitol Corridor trains, and probably the ACE and Cal Train services, all have a basic problem: they share tracks with freight trains. And due to the agreements with Union Pacific, the freight trains take priority. So this accounts for a lot of the delays. When I stopped riding, I understood that slowly the tracks were being upgraded with more turn-outs so that one train could move to the siding while another went by.

Another big problem is the fact that the UP tracks are at street level in many places. This means that there are many pedestrian deaths every year because people are used to slow freight trains and just don't expect a passenger train to come along at 50 mph or faster in the middle of town. In my own town a relatively large amount of young people have died with their headphones on, walking the tracks, thinking they will hear the train and have time to get away, I guess. And then there are the suicides.

BART solves this problem by having elevated, subterranean, or fenced off rights of way. Even in areas where UP could fence off street level tracks, it doesn't. It is immune to lawsuits and hence doesn't care.
 
Caltrain owns the ROW between San Francisco and San Jose, UP owns from San Jose to Gilroy. VTA is working with UP to improve on-time by constructing some sidings and double tracking. Their current on-time is 86%

As far as Capitol Corridor goes, their on-time average is also at 86% for the year (September was 93%). The Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority has worked very well with the UP to run these trains on time, and the infrastructure work undertaken by both groups has been hugely successful.

There are no contracts that give freight trains priority. Quite the contrary. When Amtrak was set up, the host rails were *supposed* to give Amtrak trains priority, in exchange for incentive payments. Some railroads work hard to get that money, the UP generally doesn't - but they have been pretty good partners with Amtrak California in the last few years.

In 2007, there were 482 train/pedestrian casualties in the United States as a result of trespassing on tracks. 82 of them were in California. I don't know how many of those occurred in the bay area.

Statistics aside, it's a false choice to make this an either/or proposition between BART and Capitol Corridor. Both have a role to play.
 
Oh, I agree that Capitol Corridor has a vital role to play - in the Bay Area to Sacramento route. Once BART goes into downtown San Jose, I don't see much need for CC to go all the way down there, other than perhaps to eliminate the need for San Jose-Sacramento travelers to transfer from BART to Capitol Corridor in, say, Oakland or at some intermodal station north of there.

It sounds like the track upgrades have improved CC's on-time performance. I can guarantee it was nowhere near that good in 2001. And this was with packed trains between Oakland and San Jose during commute hours. Still I'd take CC to work every day with my bicycle - even though it meant a 16 mile bike ride roundtrip to fill in the gaps. The gridlock between Oakland and San Jose during the dot com boom was that bad.
 
I was surprised by the UP back in September when my partner and I went with my friend Eric and Eric's friend Eric on the one-time detour of the California Zephyr over the original WP California Zephyr's Feather River Route. Considering we were intruding on an all-freight route, I did not expect that all freighters would yield to us, but they did. I figured we'd be 2nd class citizens on that ROW and be side tracked many times. I didn't think freight was much of an issue on the CalTrain ROW and Dan has confirmed why above. Below San Jose it's a different story, so maybe that is part of the reason that reviving the old Del Monte into Monterey hasn't (ahem) gained much steam.

Do we have train enthusiasts in other regions that have similar commuter/passenger rail systems that are candidates for further expansion, and who can share some of the issues that must be addressed in accomplishing these projects? I didn't intend to have the greater Bay Area's transit situation hijack this thread completely.
 
Wow! I missed that Feather River detour! I would have been there in a second. I might have even been able to persuade John to come along (Being an Amtrak employee, a ride on a train is not his idea of fun. But something like that might bring out his hidden railfan ;-)

Here in Seattle, we have another northbound Cascades run starting as soon as the customs details get worked out (assuming it doesn't get cut as part of the drastic budget cuts here in WA state) and, even more exciting, Sound Transit's bond issue passed, so they will soon start on service to the Eastside.
 
Freight trains sure seemed to have the right of way when I rode Capitol Corridor... and more than one conductor confirmed that freight trains were the cause of significant delays in the mornings coming from Sacramento.

One time I remember that hot weather was the cause of the delays. It caused the tracks to elongate and separate. The CC trains didn't have a problem with them, but the freights did. And so on.

I'm glad if things have changed since I rode CC. But for a commuter service from Oakland to San Jose, it still leaves a lot to be desired. Not enough stops in the East Bay, and once you get to San Jose you basically need a car to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, or brave the expressways on a bicycle (like I did). And you need to have a job where they don't care if you're an hour late on a regular basis!
 
Wigwag Sighting Today

We buzzed over to Santa Cruz today to enjoy the great weather and ended up at the intersection of Murray & Seabright (and the UP line up to Davenport) and I noticed there's still an active wigwag there. Since traffic signals can control things and crossing arms would create a mess, there is a wigwag deployed at one corner. Had I remembered that we had brought the camera, I could have posted a shot of it here. Oh well, that's the price you pay for enhancing the perspective while people- and high surf-watching at Steamers Lane ;-)
 
A WIGWAG??????????

How kool is that!

On Dan's Wigwag site, on p. 1 of the photo gallery, there is a wigwag photo from Santa "Claus", Ca. Is this a typo, or is there a Santa Claus, CA -- doing a Google map search, the only town with that name is in Arizona. The description in the photo says the line is UP/Amtrak.

Is this the one you saw??

Rob.

http://www.trainweb.org/dansrailpix/WIG_WAG_photos1.htm
 
Hey Rob, that's the Santa Cruz one (not the Santa Claus one--I don't know where that one's from but I do know that Amtrak doesn't run through Santa Cruz) directly above. It doesn't look any different from when the pix were taken in 2001.

Thanks for posting the Seabright/Murray scene.

Ralph
 
Wigwags on YouTube

Ralph,

That second link I sent ... I just went back to it and realized that there was an actual video clip of that wigwag in operation. Also, there seems to be other related videos of wigwags in operation. WOW ... talk about a turn-on!!!!!!!!

I don't know about your area, but in my area, crossing gates are a necessity as the drivers would try to run the train ... I don't want to be the police officer called to the scene of a crash ... Heck, sometimes they drive right through the gates!

Rob.
 
Yes, crossing arms are just about everywhere now but people still try to defeat them. It's a regular thing to have incidents where a vehicle or person was on CalTrain's tracks when they shouldn't have been, with fatal results. Now there are calls to fence off the CalTrain peninsula route like BART fences of their ROW. I am firmly against the idiot-proofing of America and feel that if you don't have the sense to stay off the tracks or heed the crossing arms, maybe you don't belong in the gene pool.

I can only imagine the examples you must see all too often, Rob.
 
Also, forgot to mention the great clip of the wigwag in action. This is the scene twice a day, a train in each direction, going to and coming from the cement plant in Davenport. Usually about 25 cars. I'll bet it's a primo gig for some high-seniority train crews. With great scenes like going over the Capitola trestle with views of the village and beach below.
 
Yes, even the crossing arms don't stop some drivers from trying to cross the tracks with a locomotive bearing down on them. Some of these are suicide attempts, others are just stupidity.

A few blocks from my house is a set of crossing arms just before the elevated BART tracks, and then a stop light/crosswalk for a major intersection. There's just enough room for one car between the crossing arms and the crosswalk. It used to really upset me when someone would follow too closely and then stop on the tracks. Not much I could do to help them if a train came along and I had a red light and cross traffic in front of me. Luckily this set of tracks is rarely used; there's another sent a few blocks further down the street that carries the freight and the speeding CC trains.

I don't know if fencing off the ROW falls under the category of idiot proofing. The railroads were given extraordinary perks and breaks in order to spur development of the rail system in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Nowadays there is no way anyone would let someone put in a heavy or highspeed rail system on surface streets. But due to historical legal allowances and also the huge cost there's little chance the railroads would ever agree to elevating, tunneling, or otherwise withdraw their existing ROW from the same level as the rest of the traffic.

It seemed that a few years ago we were getting at least a death a year on the CC tracks in my town. Haven't heard of any lately; maybe the education program in the nearby schools has worked.
 
Extreme Trains

Caught this show last night. It was aired an hour later than the listings said, but since the program during the prior timeslot was about sex in outer space, I stayed with the History Channel and lo and behold, Extreme Trains aired next. The host is a real hottie, worth watching just for him. And I've gotta say after seeing all the hot masculine men who work for UP in one capacity or another (the engineer was a cool bear, huge furry forearms and big stubby fingers gripping the controls) I wouldn't mind working for the UP myself! Oh, and the train stuff was interesting too.

Meanwhile, the suit filed against Measure B to extend BART was thrown out. And this morning's paper also reports that things are looking good for high speed rail what with all the public works projects Obama is looking at to get people back to work.
 
Good news about Measure B - BART to San Jose. And I saw a similar article in the Daily Review this morning saying that the expected economic stimulus for public works/infrastructure will help the fast rail link between Sac-SF-SJ-LA. Don't know if San Diego is on the route as yet, though. Expected completion date is 2020, which is probably overly optimistic considering all the land deals/ROW issues, but who knows? It could only take an endangered gnat to throw a monkey wrench into a project this size. Not that I'm anti-environment, but I tend to think of insects other than honey bees as not being as important as fixing our transportation system to be more fuel efficient and produce less smog.

It occurs to me, that other than the miniature steam trains in Tilden Park, long ago, that I've never ridden on a full size train pulled by steam.
 

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