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Redwood City Grade Seps: We Must Do Better
The first preliminary engineering plans for the downtown Redwood City grade separations are out. This isn't your average grade separation: it underpins the most important new piece of rail corridor...
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The Exploding Cost of Grade Separations
Recently, the San Mateo County Transportation Authority prepared a grade separation program update, discussing past and future projects. What immediately jumps out of this document, and others...
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August 2021 Timetable Review
Caltrain was recently returned to more or less full service, with a timetable that is supposedly simpler (with a claim of just five stopping patterns) and features 104 trains per weekday, the most...
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Down the Tubes with DTX!
DTX overviewSan Francisco's Downtown Rail Extension project (DTX), officially known as the Transbay Transit Center Program Phase 2, is a two-mile tunneling project to extend the peninsula rail corridor...
View ArticleNews Roundup, March 2022
It's been a while since the last post, but fear not this blog is still alive.Caltrain's First Major Accident: on Thursday 10 March 2022, a southbound train was unable to stop before ramming into at...
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Capital Spending for Better Service
Wouldn't it be great if you could quantify the service benefit of capital improvements, to compare and prioritize them by how much better train service results? We can, and using our handy Taktulator,...
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HSR Lays an Egg in Caltrain's Nest
California's high-speed rail project has finally reached a milestone 14 years after the passage of Proposition A in 2008 with the board's certification of the Final Environmental Impact Report for the...
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News Roundup, October 2022
CBOSS Dumpster Fire Update: the CBOSS case is still making its way through San Mateo County Superior Court (under case file 17CIV00786). The trial was held in April through June of this year, and...
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Leaping Off the Fiscal Cliff
One phrase we're going to hear a lot in the next couple of years is "fiscal cliff," a sudden disequilibrium between Caltrain's revenues and expenses caused by the withdrawal of the temporary federal...
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Deadly Caltrain Underpasses
The recent storms demonstrate once again that Caltrain underpass flooding is a clear and present danger to the public. Deadly is no understatement: while only harrowing water rescues occurred in the 31...
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The False Choice of Link21
Link21, the nascent megaproject to beef up the Bay Area's passenger rail network, features at its core a new underground transbay passenger rail crossing between Oakland and San Francisco. One of the...
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BEMU Obsession
Barry the BEMU,Caltrain's new mascot"Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget—and I'll tell you what you value."There's a new obsession gripping Caltrain: the Battery EMU, an electric train...
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Level Boarding: Still Not Getting It
The good news: Caltrain has initiated a small study effort to develop a level boarding roadmap, as part of its portfolio of capital projects.The bad news: in the summary of this study, Caltrain shows...
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First Look at Electric Service
Caltrain's proposed weekday peak serviceCaltrain has started to pull back the curtain on their fall 2024 service pattern, when the electric fleet will (finally!) enter service.The peak service pattern...
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New Year, New Risks
It's 2024, the year that Caltrain is supposed to go electric. All the wires are up and six trains are already on the property (see delivery spreadsheet), with more on the way shortly. After years of...
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The Cost of EMU Maintenance
Caltrain recently published a strategic financial plan update, where we learn that maintaining each EMU in the new electric fleet in good working order is expected to cost $1.2 - 1.5 million per year,...
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Level Boarding is Legal in California
Arrow level boarding platformsat San Bernardino, CAComments to old posts on this blog are stored in a moderation queue that your author doesn't visit often enough. Over a year ago, commenter jpk122s...
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Diridon Delusions
San Jose is striving to redesign and expand its Cahill Street station, named for the (still living) former mayor Rod Diridon, to meet the needs of future rail service including BART and high-speed...
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August 2024 Open Thread
Open thread time! Feel free to jump into the comments below.Driving like a grandma: electric service started on August 11th. Initially and until September 21st, EMUs operate on the current diesel...
View ArticleSeptember 2024 Open Thread
Electric service starts this weekend. The blog comment system stopped working on the August open thread, so let's try this instead?
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Cars on the Tracks
Cars turning off from a grade crossing onto the tracks are a perennial problem for Caltrain, often resulting in multi-hour cascading delays or worse, dangerous collisions. The statistics are shocking:...
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Another Path to Level Boarding
A complication in Caltrain's coming transition to level boarding is found in the train's bathroom, an amenity that requires equal access for passengers with reduced mobility under ADA regulations....
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Caltrain's Plan for Level Boarding
Some good news: Caltrain is working on a level boarding plan, as documents requested under the Public Records Act attest. Their "Level Boarding Roadmap: Technical Task Force Platform Report" dated...
View ArticleMarch 2025 Open Thread
The comment section from the last post is about to overflow, so here is an open thread to keep the discussions going. Some noteworthy developments fished out of the previous comments:Caltrain's...
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Fixing Santa Clara County
Today, Caltrain is hardly recognizable with regular and punctual half-hour service all day, every day, using swift and comfortable trains that are the envy of any North American regional rail system....
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