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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

There's pretty limited passing on the routes judging from the schedule [0]. It looks like there are a couple sections along the corridor where there's an extra rail for passing [1].

[0] https://www.caltrain.com/schedules/pdfs?active_tab=route_exp... [1] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/statewid...

They don't really pass, except in Burlingame and Sunnyvale. I think they basically just leave enough room between regular trains for the bullets to skip some stations. This is one of the reasons I think the SJ-SF segment of HSR may end up being a bottleneck.

There are three passing points on the line, where trains can pass each other without interrupting opposite-direction traffic. From North to South, they are…

• 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.

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.

Thanks, missed that in my efforts.

San Francisco to Sunnyvale is 40+ miles. 45 minutes is unrealistic unless you're right next to the freeway and traveling when there's zero traffic.

"Driving (at times) should be about 45 minutes"

Most people aren't commuting to work in the city at 2 AM on a Sunday.

It can be considerably slower at peak times.

Of course, but only because of equally self-inflicted mismanagement. Caltrain can also be considerably slower. All the way to "okay, we are lucky this train stopped in a station and let's switch to Lyft." Exactly similar to "between 45 minutes and youll-never-get-there" for the freeway.

(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.)

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