21–30 of 140 posts
I 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.
Most people aren't commuting to work in the city at 2 AM on a Sunday.
It can be considerably slower at peak times.
Someone 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.
I suspect there's enough political influence in that town to prevent it from happening
Some of the Caltrain electric trainsets are currently running, intermixed with the two generations of Diesel trains. And the occasional freight train, which is a Union Pacific operation.
I did see one electric trainset being towed by the breakdown locomotive, an old Diesel that Caltrain uses to recover stuck trains.
[1] https://i.dllu.net/caltrain317_4c6c80561b5156c3.jpg (6878 x 2048)
If you ignore wait times. Why couldn’t they have just sped up the train?
Anyone interested in Caltrain operation should check out the Caltrain HSR blog, https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/ . It's not just about high-speed rail. For example, last week the blog pointed out that the new trains take an extra 8-10 seconds after stopping at a station to begin opening the doors. Which chews up 12% of the trip time savings achieved by the move from diesel to electrified trains!
It's interesting... I wonder if extending the step while the train is in motion has the potential to knock people down who's currently on the platform and standing too close to the train.
> since the step itself does not extend over the platform (it reaches only 63.5 inches from vehicle center line when fully extended) there can be no hazard to passengers
I dunno about that. What if they had an umbrella or grocery bag or such dangling over the platform edge?
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Maybe the more relevant question is how was it done before? Did the old train also have slowly-extending steps? How is it handled in other countries with functional train networks?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
[0] https://www.caltrain.com/schedules/pdfs?active_tab=route_exp... [1] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/statewid...
As 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.
European trains are lovely. But coming from New York, where our regional rail runs with Swiss on-timeness, the tolerance for delays in the U.K. and Germany is wild.
