(The following article by Sean Holstege was posted on the Tri-Valley Herald website on October 13.)
OAKLAND — Think of Jiffy Lube for trains and you’ll get a sense for why Amtrak’s big guns got excited Tuesday about opening a new $71 million maintenance facility in the West Oakland rail yards.
The operative word here is jiffy, and that’s good news to Amtrak’s California Zephyr tourists and routine riders on the inter-city Capitol Corridor and San Joaquin lines.
A specially designed system of parallel tracks and trenches allow some of the 150 mechanics to replace a wheel set in an hour. A few hundred yards down the tracks, they can wash an entire train in three minutes. Inside a huge hangar just off Third Street, crews can scour over a locomotive from top to bottom, replenishing the diesel engine with mechanical fluids while co-workers repair the undercarriages.
The entire 22-acre facility, visible just from the main line between Oakland’s Jack London Square and Emeryville stations, replaces a 100-year-old shed in the heart — and in the way — of Union Pacific’s freight rail yards.
It’s good news for the East Bay, too. Amtrak is hiring an unspecified number of mechanics to work at the new maintenance yard. When the Amtrak Kirkham Maintenance Facility goes into full operation next month, Amtrak will service all of 20 locomotives and 78 rail cars on the Capitol Corridor and San Joaquins.
Previously trains had to take a three-day detour to be serviced in Los Angeles. It means more reliable service and cleaner trains on Amtrak’s third- and fifth-busiest inter-city rail lines.
That’s one of the reasons the Caltrans Rail Division, which pays for that Oakland-based service, poured $38 million into the new maintenance yard.
“I never thought today was going to happen. The road to this facility was 20 years in the making,” said Caltrans rail chief Warren Webber. “It opens within budget and significantly ahead of schedule.”
Amtrak President David Gunn was equally pleased.
“I’ve been in the business 40 years and I’ve seen more railroad facilities close than open,” he said calling Caltrans’ rail system a model for the nation. “The key is incremental improvements. It’s results in our lifetime, not waiting for something 20 years from now.”
“Now we will be able to focus on improving our service,” said Gunn, who has fought Congress just to get the money to keep the deteriorating national passenger rail system intact.