"And other countries, like India, are moving much faster toward electrification."
Well a lot of countries are almost fully electric, and have been for decades?
Caltrain's new electric trains
11–20 of 140 posts
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#12Someone tell the Town of Atherton that electric trains don't pollute. I think they're now up to 3 lawsuits against California high speed rail, at least two of which are on environmental reasons.
Can we just tell the town of Atherton to not exist? Atherton is a "general law" city of California and the legislature can dissolve it with a simple majority vote. The purpose of a city in California is to advance and further state policy, so I never understood why the state stands around acting powerless while reactionaries thwart broadly supported state initiatives.
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#13As a European, this article is outright bizarre, and makes me appreciate what we have much more. I will complain less about trains from now on.
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#14"And other countries, like India, are moving much faster toward electrification." Well a lot of countries are almost fully electric, and have been for decades?
Where? Switzerland is 100% but most of continental Europe, Japan and Korea is in the 60-70%s. Then we got USA with 0.84%
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#15Someone tell the Town of Atherton that electric trains don't pollute. I think they're now up to 3 lawsuits against California high speed rail, at least two of which are on environmental reasons.
Can we just tell the town of Atherton to not exist? Atherton is a "general law" city of California and the legislature can dissolve it with a simple majority vote. The purpose of a city in California is to advance and further state policy, so I never understood why the state stands around acting powerless while reactionaries thwart broadly supported state initiatives.
The problem would also be solved by building affordable housing under the new state initiatives, which prohibit the cities to block construction. New residents will very quickly dominate the voter base, problem solved.
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#16I was just looking at Caltrain routes yesterday wondering how there’s a route from Sunnyvale to SF that takes over 2 hours. Driving (at times) should be about 45 minutes. Didn’t make sense to me.
Make sure you're looking at the new schedules (https://www.caltrain.com/media/33909) which go into effect on September 21 of this year. The slowest trips between SF and Sunnyvale are ~65 minutes and the fastest is ~50 minutes.
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#17Someone tell the Town of Atherton that electric trains don't pollute. I think they're now up to 3 lawsuits against California high speed rail, at least two of which are on environmental reasons.
*Building the line* has a massive environmental impact, so they're not wrong as such. The risk of course is doing what has been done with HS2 in the UK, all the environmental damage before killing most of the project and thus no end benefit*. * Unless you count enriching your tory donors by selling them the cancelled land secretly within hours of cancelling the project.
Make the highways wider and use tens of millions of cars over decades.
Then again, jet fuel will get you there faster. Flying 400 miles is more relaxing than driving.
How do electric trains compare? I’m having a little problem with common sense today.
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#18Are the overhead wires copper? If so what gauge? Anyone know how many lbs per linear foot of copper that would yield ? Asking for a friend
Not pure copper, they need to be tight enough for minimal sag between supports, and not wear from abrasion (the phantograph touching the wire). Copper doesn't have good characteristics for that. I don't know what Caltran uses, but it is common to have a steel core and plate it with something else.
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#19The trains are Stadler KISS electric multiple units with 7 cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caltrain_Modernization_Program...
Re: Caltrain's new electric trains
#20I was just looking at Caltrain routes yesterday wondering how there’s a route from Sunnyvale to SF that takes over 2 hours. Driving (at times) should be about 45 minutes. Didn’t make sense to me.
It's the local, when you drive you don't stop every 5 miles and pick-up/drop-off a couple dozen people :) The bullets (limited stops) is actually really fast (~45 minutes MTV to SF). At rush hour when it's 1.5 hours from Sunnyvale to downtown SF that's when the bulk of the bullets are scheduled and it's twice as fast as driving, plus you can have a beer ;)
How do the “bullets” work? Passing local trains when they’re stopped on stations? I didn’t notice a third set of rails anywhere for that.