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Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

Note that "this Fall", Caltrain's electrified service is finally happening:

  https://www.caltrain.com/projects/electrification/project-benefits/caltrain-electrified-service-plan

Most of the stations will get faster with more frequent service. I think the electric EMUs also means the ancient clunker ones will be gone.

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We'll have to see about that. This claim was used before for the "baby bullet" service. What actually happened is a few trains each day skip a number of stations and so achieve quite a bit faster trip. ... When they are not delayed for other reasons which is often, or don't revert to stopping at every station.

According to the link, the local service trains will see the biggest improvements from electrification (100 minutes -> 75 minutes). This makes sense because my understanding is the the electrified system is quite a bit faster in accelerating which really helps when station stops are only a couple miles apart [0].

The difference on the express service is much less (65+ mins to "under an hour"), presumably since the trains can spend more time at or close to top speed due to longer distances between stops.

[0] You can see a list of stations and mile markers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Caltrain_stations

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