(The following article by Justin Jouvenal was posted on the Oakland Tribune website on May 6.)
OAKLAND, Calif. — Caltrain’s new “baby bullet” express trains will revolutionize the commute on the Peninsula, but the convenience also will come with a price: new dangers for commuters and pedestrians who don’t obey safety guidelines.
Trains will run faster, more frequently and shoot through stations at top speeds. Weekend service will also resume after a two-year hiatus. All of these factors and others will make safety even more of an issue on a line where 125 people have died over the last 12 years.
“As long as people obey the rules, baby bullet trains won’t pose any new dangers,” said Robert Doty, manager of rail operations for Caltrain. “But it’s the bad habits we are going to have to stop.”
They include skirting around lowered crossing gates, cutting across tracks and standing too close to trains on platforms. Caltrain is making an effort to break those habits this week, ahead of the baby bullet launch June 7. Officials are flooding passengers with safety messages on everything from leaflets to boxes of mints.
Doty said the biggest change passengers will notice is that more than half of trains will be skipping stations because of a revision in Caltrain’s schedule. That means a 300-ton, three-story train roaring through a station at nearly 80 mph.
Caltrain also will increase the number of trains it runs each day from 76 to 86 because of the baby bullet service, which will cut the travel time between San Francisco and San Jose from 90 minutes to less than an hour.
The train’s maximum speed — 79 mph — will stay the same, but because of signal and track upgrades, much higher average speeds will be the rule over most of the line. The higher speeds may fool people that are used to crossing in front of trains traveling at slower speeds. Another major change is that pedestrians won’t know which direction a train will come from on which track.
“From time to time, a northbound train will operate on a southbound track and vice versa,” said Janet McGovern, a Caltrain spokeswoman.
A new signaling system will allow operations in either direction on either track.
Caltrain will begin running weekend trains June 5 but will make practice runs of the baby bullet service on the weekends of May 15 and May 22 so engineers can get used to the new service. Weekend service had been shut down so crews could install passing tracks for the baby bullet.
Over the last several years, Caltrain has spent millions of dollars on fencing, new platforms, safety striping, trespassing enforcement and education programs to try to cut down on the number of deaths that have plagued the rail line.
So far, there have been two suicides on the rail line this year. There were 10 deaths last year, including seven suicides, and five fatalities in 2002.
Doty said it’s important to remember that these deaths have a big impact not only on the families that have lost loved ones but on the train crews.
“People don’t appreciate it’s the train crew that has to deal with accidents as well,” Doty said.