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 that can travel without overhead wires using electricity drawn from a large battery on board the train. The BEMU features prominently in Caltrain's recently approved two-year budget, which offers the best way to understand the agency's values. We find allocations for: $80M for a single BEMU prototype train (at a $25M premium over a regular EMU) $3.7M for in-house BEMU research and deve ..read more

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 major dilemmas facing this program is what kind of rail service to put in that new tunnel. The choice is posed between BART (understood as wide-gauge single-level rolling stock) and regional rail (understood as standard gauge FRA-compatible rolling stock). One or the other, but not both. This is a false choice! Yes, we can have both. They can share the same tunnels and tracks, if we can just get ..read more

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 December 2022 atmospheric river, two people lost their lives in the flooded Hillcrest Boulevard underpass in Millbrae on 23 December 2021. Poor "split" grade separation designs that only marginally lower the height of the tracks compared to fully elevated tracks are sure to kill again if Caltrain and surrounding communities continue to build more of them. (lookin' at you, Redwood City!) Ha ..read more

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 subsidies instituted during the pandemic. The slow recovery of ridership, which until 2019 had funded ~70% of the railroad's operating expenses, is opening a $50 million/year hole in Caltrain's budget outlook through the rest of this decade, according to a draft Short Range Transit Plan (SRTP) recently submitted to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). The SRTP is a process that every ..read more

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 closing briefs are due in December. Closing arguments are currently scheduled to be made in court on the 5th of January 2023. The latest kerfuffle is over a post-trial Caltrain/Parsons motion to seek punitive damages from Alstom for intentionally, not just negligently, lying about the status of the project based on testimony given during the trial. Trains Without Wires: Caltrain held a VIP invitation ..read more

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 San Francisco - San Jose project section. This voluminous document has come a long way since the early days of a four-track 125 mph rail corridor initially envisioned for our region, having been whittled down to a two-track 110 mph "blended system" project that shares tracks with Caltrain without building any new overtaking tracks. Nevertheless, the cost estimates for the project have ballooned ..read more

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, we will. This service pattern evaluation tool was formulated around time-based service quality metrics. We use it to explore future improvements to the peninsula rail corridor. Today's 2022 Timetable: 94 service points -- The current peak schedule with four diesel trains per hour features very generous padding and SF - SJ trip times ranging from 66 minutes (express) to 99 minutes (local). T ..read more

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 least two rail-going flatbed crane trucks being used by an electrification construction crew. 13 people were injured with five requiring hospital treatment; thankfully there was no loss of life. With the new positive train control (PTC) system in place, this collision should never have happened. The fact that it did has drawn scrutiny from the National Transportation Safety Board, which dispatched ..read more

DTX overview San 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 from its existing terminus in the Mission Bay neighborhood to the purpose-built basement "train box" of the Salesforce Transit Center (SFC). The project is regionally important, as there are more jobs located within a half-mile radius of the SFC than within a half-mile radius of all Caltrain stops combined, from 4th and King all the way to Gilroy. The DTX is nearly shovel-ready, in the ..read more

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 ever. Let's take a closer look using our handy taktulator, which assigns a timetable a score based on frequency and connectivity. The formulation of the service quality metrics underlying the scores is described here. Caltrain's 2021 peak hour timetable achieves a score of only 96, meaning the service is slightly worse than the taktulator's baseline, the 2011 peak hour timetable, which a decade ago ..read more