From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: CalTrain Article
Organization: LLNL
Distribution: ba
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 00:55:52 GMT

In article <1993Jan5.234845.6113@ntmtv> adrian@ntmtv.UUCP (Adrian Brandt) writes:
>In article <1993Jan5.203149.9908@s1.gov>, lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
: > 
: > 	In the railfan magazine _Rail Classics_ (Jan/Feb 1993), there
: > is an article on Big Ding-Ding, er, CowTrain, er, CalTrain that some
: > of you folx might be interested in.
>
: > I found entertaining the description of the upper-level seats; from
: > the lower level, they look like seats mounted in the luggage racks.
>
>I guess you're easily entertained.  Sounds like the author was being
>a bit cutesy, but you, as usual, are still into juvenile name-calling.

	C'mon, I was just trying to be cute. The article mentioned
none of those nicknames.

	I've learned of a cute nickname for BART:

	Bay Area Reckless Transit

: > 	Some of you Peninsula Rail 2000 people might take exception to
: > some of the characterization of the system, so you are hereby invited
: > to flame away.
>
>What's there to flame about?  Just because the article's author was
>(apparently) being creative in describing how the upper-level seats
>appear to be in some sort of luggage rack (depending on your point of
>view, they are directly behind the overhead luggage racks), you expect
>flames?

	Read the article and you'll see.

: > The stations were described as "much less sophisticated affair than
: > their BART cousins"
>
>It's true, so what.  Is the $170+ million Colma BART station something
>to be proud of?  That money would electrify the whole CalTrain line and
>pay for the electric locomotives to run it!  That money is over 70% of
>what the whole ~50-mile CalTrain right of way purchase cost!

	I thought it was $125 million.

	Well, one of the things I hope to do someday is to get a
complete breakdown of the costs of various BART extensions.

	I've seen some handouts on the Dublin-Pleasanton extension,
which I am interested in for obvious reasons, and the following
projects are mentioned in addition to track and station construction:

	Widening I-238/I-580 in a couple places, such as near the West
D/P station and where it crosses the existing BART line; the former is
necessary to make room for the BART tracks and stations and the latter
to alleviate the nearly perpetual morning-time traffic jams I see from
the UL bus when I go to the BART line.

	Building new bridges for this freeway, as where it crosses the
old SP right-of-way at East D/P and where it crosses the existing BART
line; the former is for "safety reasons" and the latter is to allow
the D/P spur to branch off from the existing line and come up to the
freeway's level.

	And for the West Pittsburg extension, there is some rebuilding
of Port Chicago Hwy. between the Concord BART station and Hwy. 4, and
also some big highway reconstruction along the way to West Pittsburg.

	If these are included in the ~$500 million budgets for each
extension, then the cost per mile for BART track and stations alone
will probably go way down.

: > and the proposed CalTrain tunnel to Market St. was described as
: > "appear[ing] to be prohibitively expensive".
>
>That's more or less true.  All of the officially studied alternatives
>*appear* to be prohibitively expensive.  There are serious questions as
>to how the costs being publicly thrown around were arrived at, however.
>It seems the JPB and SamTrans staff didn't want to study a fairly
>detailed proposal to loop CalTrain up and into the Transbay Terminal.
>
>Another interesting fact regarding the downtown SF extension issue is
>that at one time CalTrain was so close to running downtown that notices
>were put out on trains announcing service to the Ferry Building.  In
>fact, the official CalTrain schedule at that time (early eighties, I
>believe) was printed up showing the Ferry Building station stop!  This
>service was to run on surface streets along moderately upgraded
>existing track that extended beyond the 4th and Townsend St. station
>along King St. to the Embarcadero.

	Street-running extension in the middle of downtown San
Francisco???

	Was that really serious?????

	Just wait until there is a traffic jam :-(

	Given the braking distance of a CalTrain (according to Amtrak,
one of the biggest that their engineers have ever encountered), they
will have to run their trains vveerryy sslloowwllyy.... think of the
traffic tie-ups that would happen as a 6-car train goes by... that's
_if_ they don't block off the street...

	Yes, I know, there are some Oakland streets that Amtrak and
freight trains run on, but these are pretty close to the waterfront
and the UP and SP dispatachers can always schedule their trains to run
when the traffic is least, an option not available for CalTrain.
Amtrak runs on the SP line, which is on the last street before all the
waterfront stuff, while UP runs on a street a couple of streets
inward.

>What happened?  There was a bunch of last minute political jockeying
>and lobbying to halt it.  I've heard that there were some business and
>land interests along that route that had SF oppose/kill that idea.  Oh
>well, it was close!  (But no cigar.)  Instead of such a cheap, easy
>extension, we can now wallow in the newer more wonderful $600+ million
>plans that we are being "offered".  There are a lot of folks who will
>do anything they can to torpedo the downtown extension and CalTrain in
>general.  It's definitely a threat to BART's "manifest destiny", a
>major thorn in BART's side.  Making sure that anything having to do
>with CalTrain is gold-plated to the max and controversial as possible
>serves the anti-CalTrain agenda well.  A lot of these BARTians aren't
>dumb.  They know that an upgraded CalTrain can and will show up BART
>in a big way.

	It would be interesting to know the whole story of this.
Perhaps these land and business interests were afraid of traffic
tie-ups due to long, slow trains going past, especially during the
worst possible time: rush hour. And those F40's are *noisy*. So I
guess their response was simply NIMBY.

	The elevated and the underground options, however, get around
the traffic problems.
-- 
/Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
/lip@s1.gov
Newsgroups: ba.transportation