Caltrain's new electric trains
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
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?
The old trains have no moving steps.
> This can be fixed in software. As seen in the timeline graphic, allowing the step to deploy and retract while the train is in motion would remove this wasted dwell time.
If it's over the edge the train itself will take their arm with it.
The step does stick out a little more.
Fixed, non-moving stairs. IIRC, the bombardier model was 2 steps (one step up to a metal stair, one more step into car) and fairly easy, and the older gallery models were a bunch of stairs and a pretty steep climb.
> How is it handled in other countries with functional train networks?
Level boarding, no? IIRC NYC's commuter rail is level boarding within The City (but not further out like CT) and, e.g., the more subway-y line of the T in Boston are level boarding, but those are subway. (I don't recall the MBTA's commuter rail, but I suspect it isn't, or isn't everywhere.)
Why?
Anecdotally, this is also true of the San Francisco Municipal subway. The subway cars take a long time to open and close doors because there is a mechanical bridge that closes the gap between the train and the platform. This is also a pretty big time sink for the subway system
No. It's because the whole thing is crazy slow. Fear of lawsuits? I don't know. The door warnings on Caltrain, Bart, Muni are often comically offset compared to the door motions. That is, too late to be useful as legal warnings.
My understanding is that the primary overall improvement is about the additional service hours that can be provided by the new trains.
Yes, it's nice to shorten the time for an individual traveling SF <-> SJ... but the benefits compound even more because now Caltrain can offer more trips per day using the same number of train consists.
[1] https://i.dllu.net/caltrain317_4c6c80561b5156c3.jpg (6878 x 2048)
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.
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.
I suspect there's enough political influence in that town to prevent it from happening
Homeowners don't want to move? No problem, just eminent domain them or invent some new CEQA provision by a simple majority vote. It's about time the state learned to use its powers!
There might be some brave souls willing to pick a fight with Atherton's leading citizens. But no one like that is serving in the state legislature.
The purpose of ALL government is to _serve_ citizens. There are too many people who see government as the bully pulpit, which is bad enough, but to openly lust after that power is always unsettling to me.
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.
How much amps do they need? 2000A? 5000A? How do they carry so much current?
That's a dream. I know. But I do recall Amtrak saying something about making the existing tracks capable of >80mph between Portland and Seattle, and the Talgo trainsets they have now are rated for 120mph IIRC. So maybe we'll get something that doesn't suck.
I take the Eurostar a few times a year for work between Amsterdam and Paris and there's literally no security whatsoever. If there's security to board the Eurostar in routes to/from the UK maybe it's because of Brexit?
UK to Europe will have border control, passports, etc.
But re: UK<->mainland I guess it shouldn't be surprising that there's more security for the Chunnel crossing. That feels like it would be a much more likely terrorist target than a random HSR route on land.
A few years back Thalys merged with Eurostar and then last year they started rebranding the former Thalys services as Eurostar, too, which probably explains the confusion.
Only the former Eurostar services (nowadays "Eurostar Blue") have the security theatre on account of the Channel Tunnel plus UK being non-Schengen, whereas the former Thalys services ("Eurostar Red") are regular train services just like in the rest of Europe (except for Spain, which does some security theatre for its high speed trains, too, although AFAIK a bit less intense than Eurostar, which in turn is less intense than flying).
I had read some reviews saying Eurostar security was airport like on all routes, but maybe I was just reading some other schmuck's experience on an international route like mine :-). Hopefully anyone reading my comment reads a little farther so they are better informed.
And so, I amend my previous comment. I'd be satisfied with an LNER equivalent, but if I can get Eurostar speeds at LNER convenience, I definitely want that!
I wonder how much the UK paid for the LNER lines, e.g. from King's Cross up to Waverley Station in Edinburgh. Not that it has any bearing on US costs, but I'm curious. Here everything is just stupidly expensive to build, and pretty much any stakeholder can derail the whole thing, even the tiny ones. I'm not a big fan of using eminent domain but there are times when it is the sensible choice.
It's hard to come up with a definite single figure, because you'd have to go all the way back to the original railways in the 19th century and trace your way through all the upgrades that happened bit by bit since then, plus figure out how to handle inflation/purchasing power etc. across such a long time span.
I was just on a Eurostar train from Antwerp to Paris last month (connecting from a local train from Boom), the week before the olympics, even, and security was nonexistent. Didn't even have to go through a metal detector, just walked through the fare gates and boarded. I guess maybe stations are inconsistent with their security level? What did you have to go through?
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.
Deutsche Bahn is orders of magnitude better. One time my wife and I were taking the train from Venice to Munich and they (Trenitalia) simply forgot half the cars somewhere.
I know but they're the only German operator I have significant experience with.
There is no lack of stupidity, however, at the system level. The state owns the rails and procures service from private actors who then manage the traffic more or less successfully. The booking systems are chaotic, the prices are high. It is sometimes cheaper to fly domestically, even though the door-to-door time is longer.
Imagine if the U.S. could get their rail network together... Like really invest in proper, normal, modern trains. Not the tech bro vacuum tube nonsense.
Diesel engine driving electric motors (for torque and efficiency)
I think that's what parent meant.
If it's being called electric it's not going to have a diesel engine of any sort.
I don't think I've ever seen a diesel train, ever. In fact, for a long time I was (blissfully) unaware of their existence and the fact that they do exist still surprises me...
The Chicago area (where I live) is serviced by electric train lines that go back at least 100 years.
The issue that the US faces is that Americans prefer private travel and that the demographics make that hard to overcome. Our tax policy doesn’t make it easier but frankly there is no economic reason to extend our electric train infrastructure further than it exists.
[edit] that’s without mentioning that the US has the most highly developed rail infrastructure in the world. We choose to put freight on it…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caltrain_Modernization_Program
The optional noise (horns and bells, especially near the level crossings) is obscene and I don't know why we put up with it. Everywhere the trains go, people plug their ears to avoid hearing damage. It's a miserable failure of government.
Computer vision has come a long way and PoE cameras are now super cheap, would be nice if they installed cameras as part of the electrification project that could continually verify whether crossings /track was clear ahead. It could prevent at least the accidental collisions much better than a horn+bell.
Starting with cameras only at the crossings would prevent these with extremely low cost, and crossings are also the only places where the train must blow the horn.
Once we left, it took weeks for our bodies to relax into the silence. It's not normal to have chronic noise like that and increased our stress. It shouldn't be legal to build buildings without noise protection in place.
Electric motors are not expensive as diesel one, they are much more compact etc etc etc but are still much more expensive than a simple wagon without any engine. Meanwhile a larger electric locomotive it's still fast (for instance France TGV, Japan Shinkansen etc) and hyper-fast accelerations are not much welcomed by passengers, so it sound extra added complexity for little to no return. Something not different than some modern tram projects (city buses with electric motors, no battery, and a special trolley to allow get dedicated aerial electricity while rolling on wheels) that in theory sounds good (much less expensive in capex than create new rails in cities) but in practice have so much problems and costs that they are abandoned or will not be replaced because of that.
For my little experience USA rails are much older than most EU ones (meaning, they are much less upgraded) and while that's might sound bad from some "modern" people actually IMVHO it is not much because so far ALL RAILS prove too be simply too costly for most usages, only some freight-only rails are effectively interested, passengers ones can't survive without big public contributions while offering a good service. The Swiss choose to waste an immense amount of resources to keep the service level high, pushing nearly empty trains around, all other countries tend to scale back (while formally state the contrary).
>Meanwhile a larger electric locomotive it's still fast (for instance France TGV, Japan Shinkansen etc)
What are you talking about? The shinkansen doesn't have any locomotives: all the cars are powered.
>all other countries tend to scale back (while formally state the contrary).
Japan is constantly scaling up their train service. The shinkansen is usually at full capacity, or more, which is why they're busy building the new maglev line from Tokyo to Nagoya (and later Osaka). The shinkansen system is quite profitable.
Maybe it's a translation issue: for locomotive I mean a both a dedicated wagon with no passengers and a single or two wagons with motors and passengers while all the others have no motors are just pushed/pulled by the "locomotive".
> Japan is constantly scaling up their train service.
Japan is not Tokyo, Osaka alone, it's much vast than that and economically it's passengers rails get MUCH from the State to be sustained. The issues with passengers is that you need to move them everywhere at every time, and a country is not few large (and unsustainable) cities sucking the entire country resources just to stand. You might have specific paths at specific times running at full/nearly full/overfull capacity, but we have 24h/day, 365 day/year. Or a system can satisfy 99% of the people needs or it's wasted resources, that's why https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/19/european-gover... and anyway take a look at http://carfree.fr/img/2015/06/sncf.jpg as a good dimension. I bet the situation in Japan it's not much different in that historical perspective.
Consider a thing: having cars, buses, metro, trains means under-utilizing all, it's very expensive. Having a single tool that scale means efficiency. That's why in the past we have decided the "convergence toward IP" even if IP it's not the cheaper signaling protocol, not the simplest, the point is that we need it anyway, so for scaling it's better doing next-to-anything with it. For similar reasons we choose a convergence to electricity because we need it anyway so it's logic to try using it for all. Despite all the claims and the so far little tangible progress the transportation future is by air, because not needed to maintain large and fragile and hyper-expensive to evolve ground infra it's much cheaper than the energy we still need to flight especially with chopper-alike devices (like drones).
That's exactly what a locomotive is. The shinkansen trains don't have them. All the cars have motors and propel themselves.
>The issues with passengers is that you need to move them everywhere at every time, and a country is not few large (and unsustainable) cities sucking the entire country resources just to stand.
What are you talking about? Cities are very sustainable, that's why humans have been building them and living in them for thousands of years now. Cities are the engines of any modern economy. And no, you don't need to move passengers 24x7; most people sleep at late hours so you can shut things down at those times and let the few people who need to travel use other means.
>Consider a thing: having cars, buses, metro, trains means under-utilizing all
What are you talking about? Trains and buses here in Japan are not under-utilized at all. Cars are, but that's a problem everywhere and one of many reasons people shouldn't use them so much.
>the transportation future is by air
No, it really isn't, thanks to basic physics. Maybe if someone invents a low-energy anti-gravity device.
Anyway, WTF is your point with all this? You just seem to be rambling with no point.
Specifically:
> That's exactly what a locomotive is. The shinkansen trains don't have them. All the cars have motors and propel themselves.
Ok, shinkansen have self-propelled wagons, I do not know for sure but TGV definitively not and I'm pretty sure most trains in Japan are not self-propelled for all wagons, as in the EU.
> Cities are very sustainable, that's why humans have been building them and living in them for thousands of years now.
Things changes, are have always changed. We have had urbanization and deurbanization cycles but what's different was the tech, now we have TLCs, IT, fast logistic a thing we haven't had in the known past. Meanwhile we are more and more, too much for high-resource intensive big stuff like cities.
> Cities are the engines of any modern economy.
Yes, but less and less. With the first globalization factories pull out of rich cities to go to cheap countries, with remote works there is no need for offices and as a result there is only a kind of unsustainable economics in cities: service industry to humans that are poorer and poorer. Cities are need by modern financial capitalism because you do not want self-driving taxis, uber, just eat and so on outside the city, but such form of economical and social development is at the end, being oppressive and unsustainable, consuming way too much resources for the planet.
> And no, you don't need to move passengers 24x7; most people sleep at late hours so you can shut things down at those times and let the few people who need to travel use other means.
That's what happen today and that's one of the reason of cities inefficiencies. BTW just imaging how ABSURD and inefficient is in modern times having big buildings which demand big infra around to use them for less than 12h/day commuting between them just to consume services and being exposed to physical ads in various forms.
> Trains and buses here in Japan are not under-utilized at all. Cars are, but that's a problem everywhere and one of many reasons people shouldn't use them so much.
To be tied to someone else service, right? So enslaved by conformism and other services will and design. A notorious tract of any dictatorship notoriously ending in deep sufferance and disruption. Cars are needed because collective transportation means can't substitute them, BUT, cars can substitute collective transportation means, that's why a SANE economy choose to ditch other transportation means.
> No, it really isn't, thanks to basic physics.
That's not what WEF say and not the path we really took mostly silently preoccupied by people reaction not by technical feasibility https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and if you really think despite the name it's clear that there is nothing "urban" in density and tall buildings terms for such mobility, if you go further you'll notice there is no possible green new deal future for dense area because we must re-made them from scratch a thing possible with big issues for a single building or a small area but not more and you might know that all future city projects, like Neom, Arkadag, Innopolis, Telosa, Prospera, are failed as the original Fordlandia because their model in untenable.
For Japan: do you remember the Shinkansen blocked in a plane fully exposed to the tsunami due to it's central command model? Do you remember Tokyo emergency coordination failed due again to a central design? Japan is in deep trouble as we are, because of the city-centric development, it's about time to try a totally different model possibly before the WWIII witch we will loose anyway.
This idea is simply stupid, for lack of a nicer word. Seriously stupid. You think having everyone live in suburbs and drive everywhere is better for the climate? Really, really stupid.
> I'm pretty sure most trains in Japan are not self-propelled for all wagons, as in the EU.
Again you're totally clueless. All passenger trains here have self-propelled cars. Locomotives are only used for freight trains.
>too much for high-resource intensive big stuff like cities.
Again, this shows you stupid you are. Cities use fewer resources per person than any other lifestyle: smaller homes, shared walls, less motorized transport all add up to far less resource consumption. Of course, idiotic rural Americans don't see it that way because they can't imagine a world without big gas-guzzling trucks to drive around in and just see the large number of people in cities without being able to think about anything in a per-capita sense.
>A notorious tract of any dictatorship notoriously ending in deep sufferance and disruption. Cars are needed because collective transportation means can't substitute them, BUT, cars can substitute collective transportation means, that's why a SANE economy choose to ditch other transportation means.
Ok you're obviously a complete lunatic. I give up.
What on earth are you going on about?
The vast majority of all current and new passenger trains in the EU are multiple units with no power car, because they are pretty much better in every possible way. They are cheaper to build and cheaper to operate(mainly due to being lighter overall) and can be shorter without reducing passenger capacity. Only a couple of the wagons are powered, more is not needed.
> hyper-fast accelerations are not much welcomed by passengers
Passengers want to get where they are going quickly. No train accelerates at a speed which causes discomfort to passengers.
> Passengers want to get where they are going quickly. No train accelerates at a speed which causes discomfort to passengers.
Maybe you haven't used Milan's red lines where accelerations are enough to catapult anyone standing distracted at every start or stop. Remember that sometimes trains are crowded and nowadays it normal to have toilets always open because trains collect anything instead of freely discharging in nature, since more than two decades, so it's normal to have people standing while in start/stop phases.
Well a lot of countries are almost fully electric, and have been for decades?
I think you mean diesel-electric. They are talking about electrified miles of track which is almost exclusively limited to passenger lines in the US. Even where freight trains run on electrified track, they still use diesel-electric motors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr...
I'd be very interested to see how much of a bottleneck boarding from the lower level of these trains is, in sydney we have double deckers where you board from the middle level from high platforms[1] and the stairs are already a flow limitation in the city section, I can't imagine how bad it would be with people going up two flights of stairs
[1] here's a pic: https://railgallery.wongm.com/sydney-trains-bits/F112_6364.j...
If you ignore wait times. Why couldn’t they have just sped up the train?
Since adding stations costs less time now, I guess they decided these extra two were worth it.
edit: rules around level crossings may also have something to do with the speed limit.
Didn’t make sense to me.
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 ;)
[0] https://www.caltrain.com/schedules/pdfs?active_tab=route_exp... [1] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/statewid...
• Between 22nd Street & South San Francisco, with Bayshore accessible via the 'local' tracks only.
• Between Redwood City & Menlo Park.
• Between Sunnyvale & Santa Clara, with Lawrence accessible via the 'local' tracks only.
Today, the northernmost and southernmost passing points are used by the Limited or Baby Bullet services to overtake the Local services. The service being passed has the middle station (Bayshore or Lawrence) as a scheduled stop, and remains in the station until they observe either a clear signal, or until they observe the faster service passing.
The passing point between Redwood City & Menlo Park is mostly used when a service (any service) is running slow, to allow on-time services to overtake. This is especially important when the slow-running service is a Local.
Finally, there are crossovers placed frequently along the line, often every 2-3 stations. These are used most often when maintenance is being performed on one section of track, or if a train is disabled. They are not used during normal operations.
Most people aren't commuting to work in the city at 2 AM on a Sunday.
It can be considerably slower at peak times.
(If you wonder about "lucky", it's because sometimes the crew will announce an indefinite delay when parked carefully in-between stations, where you can't even get off. My latest one like that on BART. So, same caveat with BART.)
Electrification had started in 1907 and reached 70% by 1931.
Wait a minute, aren't these tracks shared with commercial trains?
Regardless, there’s no excuse for the remaining freight (which operates in off-peak hours) to use diesel. Electric freight locomotives are perfectly common in countries where railroading isn’t still stuck in the 1800s.
But in those countries electrification is widespread enough that intermodal trains can run on electric traction all the way from terminal to terminal. (And bulk trains at the very least from the nearest marshalling yard, or maybe even the freight terminal itself, too.)
They're better for the environment.
THEY'RE BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT!
also.. they're less comfortable and less rider friendly than the old trains.. so if your goal is to get more people onto them you're probably going to fail.
Seriously? The article plied on about supposed environment benefits but only leaves this _single_ sentence on rider comfort. That tells me something, that either this person is being dishonest, or the people who deploy these trains don't have a clue.
> Because the trains are now quieter both onboard and in adjacent neighborhoods, it also might mean that more people are willing to live near the tracks.
Or they're just high.
> Caltrain’s new trains also just have the advantage of being new: The trains that are being phased out are nearly 40 years old. They were loud not just because of the diesel engines but because the doors rattled and brakes squealed. The new trains have WiFi, power outlets, better climate control, energy-efficient lighting, and more storage under the seats. (My only complaint, when I tried the train out the other day, was that the seats are now a little less comfortable—though the upholstery is easier to clean.)
They are quieter, have more amenities(in-trip wifi, plugs), have more storage space (which means more leg room), and better climate control (AC/heating/ventilation). IMHO those are all way more important to my comfort than the chairs being a bit stiff when the ride is longer than 30 minutes.
BTW - tell your "friend" to wear their insulated gloves. They can be energized up to 25,000 volts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...
The article is not worth HN. Not even the manufacturer is mentioned.
What fuel is used to generate the electricity? (Honest question since I have no idea how electricity markets work)
> Caltrain […] was the first service to convert from diesel to electric in the West. (A handful of other passenger trains in the country run on electricity, including an Amtrak line in the Northeast.)
This is so misleading that I wonder if the author did any research at all. There were too many electric interurbans to even list here, but even if you try to narrow it to heavy main lines it was not the first by any possible interpretation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Electric_railways_in_...
The saddest electric-mainline loss in Caltrain's territory is the old Sacramento Northern, part of which forms the Western Railway Museum trackage:
https://www.abandonedrails.com/sacramento-northern-railroad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_Northern_Railway
https://old.reddit.com/r/rustyrails/comments/vij28p/route_of...
Depends on which system you're talking about. Muni is 100% hydro. BART is more coy but claims their electricity is "greenhouse gas-free" and their diesel (for eBART) is "renewable".
Yes, that's why it's misleading when the author is framing the important part as "electric train exists now" and not "electric train used to be non-electric". If one must nitpick, the biggest conversion west of the Mississippi River was probably the Milwaukee Road whose converted electrified main line dwarfed Caltrain's 51 miles: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_electrification_in_th...>
“The first division to be electrified was the Rocky Mountain Division from Harlowton, Montana to Avery, Idaho. This covered a distance of 438 miles (705 km) and began electric operation in 1917. The electrification remained in operation until 1974, when diesel locomotives took over.”
“The second division to be electrified was the Coast Division between Othello, Washington to Tacoma, and to Black River just south of Seattle. This covered a distance of 207 miles (333 km) and began electric operation in 1919. The electrification remained in operation until 1972, when diesel locomotives took over.”
The short answer is that average generation in CA is:
- 51% solar
- 22% natural gas
- 21% other renewables (hydro + wind + geothermal)
- 6% nuclear
- 0.1% coal
sources:
- https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA
- https://www.gridinfo.com/california
- caiso.com is also good
The medium answer is that trains run during daylight hours, so they probably consume more solar and less natural gas than the averages suggest.
The long answer is that counterfactual modeling of electricity generation is surprisingly subtle. E.g., the Diablo Canyon nuclear power station is going to run regardless of whether Caltrain electrifies, and no more nuclear is being built either way, so really Caltrain is "responsible" for none of the nuclear generation in the state, even if the trains are consuming power at the same time that Diablo Canyon is generating. In this analysis frame, you tend to look at the marginal plant being built, which likely further pushes toward solar but depends on tons of factors in reality.