(The following story by Will Oremus appeared on the San Mateo County Times website on August 6.)
SAN MATEO, Calif. — To accommodate record ridership, Caltrain is rolling along with plans to buy eight new rail cars, despite objections from some in the engineers’ union.
The commuter rail agency’s board voted 7-1 Thursday to appoint a bond underwriter to help finance the $22 million purchase.
The new cars, built by Montreal-based Bombardier, will allow Caltrain to run longer trains on some of its most crowded routes, spokesman Jonah Weinberg said.
Despite fare increases, the rail line saw almost 11 million passengers in the fiscal year ending June 30, up 8 percent from last year and 36 percent from three years ago.
Without the new cars, Caltrain estimates that peak-hour trains will run at full capacity in about two years.
Four members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers spoke against the purchase Thursday, arguing that Bombardier’s cab cars are unsafe.
They pointed to the deadly 2005 Glendale train crash on the Los Angeles-area commuter line MetroLink, in which a train led by a Bombardier cab car jackknifed after hitting a parked SUV.
Two of the eight cars that Caltrain plans to purchase are cab cars.
A cab car is a passenger car positioned at the front of a northbound train when the locomotive pushes from the back, or at the back of a southbound train when the locomotive pulls from the front.
That “push-pull” system allows trains to run back and forth on a line without turning around.
But in a crash, the cab car provides less of a cushion to passengers than a locomotive would, the engineers said.
The union members urged the board to instead consider buying a new, Korean-made model of cab car designed to lessen the impact of a crash.
Caltrain CEO Mike Scanlon said the agency already uses Bombardier cars, the newer two-level cars that were deployed in 2002.
He said adding the two extra cabs is an “interim step” before moving toward electric trains in the years to come.
“Introducing a third type of car to this fleet, I would be very much against that,” Scanlon said. Not only would it be problematic to integrate them with the rest of the train, he said, the cars are still under development.
Scanlon said he’d be glad to sit down with the engineers, although they’re not actually Caltrain employees.
They’re employed by Amtrak, which contracts with Caltrain.
In an Aug. 1 letter responding to the union’s concerns, Caltrain rail operations manager Michelle Bouchard wrote that the agency doesn’t believe the Bombardier cars are unsafe.
Caltrain board member and former Amtrak union employee Sophie Maxwell of San Francisco was the only one who voted against appointing an underwriter Thursday.
The purchase will come back to the board for final approval in October.