SAN JOSE — Faced with declining ridership, schedule delays, and tracks in need of repair, executives from two commuter lines through the East Bay told the freight line controlling the rails the situation will get worse unless they get priority on the tracks, reports the East Bay Business News.
Officials with Altamont Commuter Express and Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor met with Union Pacific Railroad representatives at UP’s headquarters in Omaha, Neb., at the end of April to work out a way to resolve the problems. The underlying issue is that Union Pacific owns and operates the tracks on which the commuter trains run. Under the existing structure, the needs of the commuter lines are secondary to Union Pacific’s.
While representatives of the passenger lines concede that loss of jobs in Silicon Valley is the No. 1 reason for the declining ridership, late trains and unreliable schedules also hamper their ability to keep riders, says ACE director Stacey Mortensen, who attended the meeting.
Both train systems blame the late trains on faulty equipment and the inability to get repairs done in a timely manner.
“We’ve got to get that time down,” Mortensen said. “Our passengers can’t afford to be late. They have other options.”
And passengers are complaining.
“The service is not really adequate,” said Josephine Browne, who rides ACE from Tracy to San Jose most mornings. “Recently, they increased the prices promising that would help us to be on time but that didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, now it’s getting worse.”
A count of who uses the two systems daily shows 1,600 round-trip passengers for ACE and 1,200 for the Capitol Corridor between Oakland and San Jose.
The 75-mile Stockton to San Jose ACE service has lost 25 percent of its ridership during the past six months while the 45-mile section of the Capitol Corridor between Oakland and San Jose has lost 10 percent of its ridership. The Capitol Corridor lost Bay Area ridership despite a 22 percent monthly gain in January for overall ridership on its San Jose to Sacramento run.
ACE has three trains and would like to add a fourth, Mortensen says. The Capitol Corridor runs four trains in each direction, including two during morning and evening commute times, and is looking to add four new trains in 2003 and five or six more by 2005, said Gene Skoropowski, executive director for the Capitol Corridor.
The main issue is who gets priority on the rails. ACE and Capitol Corridor have been negotiating with Union Pacific for several years to gain “perpetual rights” to the UP tracks that they run on. That would give the commuter trains preference over freight trains.
The primary roadblock appears to be money, although Union Pacific wants to ensure it can continue to operate its freight services, UP spokesman Mike Furtney says. Union Pacific runs 35 freight trains daily along the Oakland-San Jose line alone, he says.
“It’s as much the discipline of the (Union Pacific) dispatchers who put a 40-mph freight train in front of an 80-mph Capitol Corridor train as much as track maintenance that is the cause for delays,” said Amtrak’s Skoropowski.
The problem is particularly acute in a three-mile stretch of track between Santa Clara’s train station and San Jose’s Ron Diridon Station. On that one, single-track stretch, ACE, Caltrain, Union Pacific, Santa Fe and Amtrak West must get their trains through.
“It’s the most congested piece of track in the state,” Skoropowski said.
Capitol Corridor has state and federal money available to double-track that area, as well as other portions of track between Oakland and San Jose once it gains first priority from UP, Skoropowski says.
Doubletracking will allow the slower freight trains to move to one side and even allow two trains to head in one direction.
Doubletracking the wetlands area between Santa Clara and Fremont, however, may take longer. Environmental issues and a $45 million price tag have put the project on hold.
For ACE, there are long stretches of track that need major repair work, including tracks in a tunnel separating Fremont from Pleasanton and tracks between Pleasanton and Livermore in Alameda County and between Stockton and Lathrop in San Joaquin County.
Bad tracks, unreliable train signals and poor scheduling mean it frequently takes an ACE train two hours and 30 minutes to go from Stockton to San Jose. ACE trains designed to run 79 mph often creep along at 10 mph or less in some areas due to these problems. ACE thinks it can get that time down to two hours once track repairs are completed.