Green Caltrain

The recent teenage suicides and an attempt in Palo Alto are causing concerns among parents. Although most suicides are rarely reported to prevent copycats, it is impossible to stop spreading the news in high schools about a fellow teenager commited suicide. Because more than one teenager have followed suit, police has no choice but to patrol the crossings until the school year ends.

A resource on teenage suicides

There was a tweet posted earlier about Caltrain Chief Operating Officer learning about the “accident” at the CAC meeting. I was actually the one who told him about that. When I announced the incident, they were asking whether it was about the incident the night before, but I confirmed that the incident I was talking about was happening right in the moment.

Earlier in the day, I made a small app with Yahoo Pipes to pull the information off Twitter and show it on transitunlimited.org. Because I don’t use IPhones or Blackberries, I check the wiki see what’s going on. I use Yahoo Pipes to basically limit tweets to those that were made within two hours (anything past that are not useful).

When the Chief Operating Officer Chuck Harvey came to our CAC meeting, he was delivering a grim news about SamTrans’s $30 million deficit and the possibility of cutting bus service by 15%. While we were discussing the topic, I was checking the wiki for information on routes that could be eliminated, but I when I check the front page, I found all the tweets about that incident, and that’s when I made the announcement.

The front page also shows service announcement for BART and other operators. BART has its own RSS feed and other transit operators rely on emails, which are converted into a RSS feed.

I haven’t post anything for a while, but I find the possible cuts to be appalling.

Unfortunately this is no surprise for me. The politicians have ignored Caltrain’s needs for too long. This time we need to take action to preserve the service we fought for and we use.

Stayed tuned.

One thing I would love to see is Caltrain running the Baby Bullet trains on weekends. Today, Caltrain runs only local trains (with stops at Atherton and Broadway) hourly on weekends. If Baby Bullet trains were provided on weekends, it would attract a lot of riders who normally don’t commute to San Francisco and otherwise take advantage of the Baby Bullet service.

In addition, I also see the weekend Baby Bullet as a way to get more political support for Caltrain. The fact is that most commuters (voters) travel locally and wouldn’t be able to take advantage of Caltrain on a daily basis. For them, their weekend experience on Caltrain is a make or break deal. Unfortunately, Caltrain only offers the least attractive service on weekends.

What prevents Caltrain from providing weekend Baby Bullet service? Caltrain’s answer is that it needs the weekend work window to accomodate construction. Caltrain has a long list of construction projects coming, from platform reconstruction to electrification. Because Caltrain is an active railroad, these construction can only proceed when trains don’t run as often in high speed.

Even so, I believe there are opportunities for some limited weekend express service. From a revenue and a political standpoint, it is a win-win. Despite the upcoming construction projects, weekend Baby Bullet does not require new taxes or a 10-year wait.

Tomorrow Caltrain will decide to increase the base fare by 25 cents. Because Caltrain is still collecting more fare revenue is projected, Caltrain put the other fare proposal, which would increase the base and per zone fares by 25 cents, off the table.

It is disappointing that some people continues to get killed by ignoring warning bells, flashing lights, and lowered gates and trying to cross the tracks. Causalities like these are unnecessary. These incidents take an emotional toll on the engineers and conductors, and cause passengers to miss their appointments. Is it worth risking your life to save 30 seconds?

Above is an Australian public service announcement on train safety.

Even for someone who is deaf or other hearing difficulties, there’s no excuse because flashing lights and lowered gates provide a visual warning. Of course everyone should always look both ways before crossing the tracks.

Last Friday’s head-on collision between a Metrolink train and a Union Pacific freight train shows that we are still a 3rd world country when comes to our railroads.

Generally, a lot of people think heavier is better. In the previous Metrolink collision three years ago in Glendale, a cab car was leading the train. As a result of that tragedy, there has been attempts by some people to ban the use of cab cars, with the belief that the accident would be less severe if a heavier locomotive were leading that train. However, this accident shows that, due to the strength and the weight of the locomotives, the locomotives would essentially transfer the energy to the next railcar rather than to absorb it. That next car was where most fatality occurred when it was pushed into the Metrolink locomotive by its momentum.

Also, this collision appears to be preventable. For a head on collision to happen, or for any collision between trains on the same track, someone must have ignored signals. Unlike driving an automobile, train signals (like regular traffic lights by the tracks) determine how fast trains should go. Train signals are to be observed strictly. More advanced railroads (including the Northeast Corridor) deploy an automatic system where the train would stop if the engineer violates a train signal. As a part of the electrification program, Caltrain is currently investigating some form of positive train control that would be built on top of the current system. Such system would prevent train to train collisions.

To my surprise a new rail car is already in service. Caltrain ordered 8 new Bombardier cars to supplement the fleet. Caltrain placed these cars in service ahead of the original schedule as some older Gallery cars are still out of service due to a product defect.

The new car at the left look almost identical the older Bombardier car at the right, except with larger windows.

The new car features vinyl seat covers, which hopefully will be kept cleaner overtime. A problem with cloth seat covers is that they trap dust, odor and dirt overtime. The older Bombardier cars are starting to smell bad because of that. Otherwise the seating configuration is the same as the older cars.

The windows are larger on the new cars. For some reasons, Caltrain has included overhead racks on the new cars. It is very easy to hit you head against the overhead rack when you try to stand up. Even Norm Mineta, then Secretary of Transportation, accidentally bumped his head against the rack when he publicly rode on the Baby Bullet a few years ago.