(The following editorial appeared on the Sacramento Bee website on February 28.)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — CC Riders, commuters who regularly ride the Capitol Corridor trains between Placer County, Sacramento and the Bay Area, wrote a letter to Thomas F. Jacobi the other day. Jacobi is Union Pacific Railroad’s regional vice president for operations west. In their letter, the commuters thanked Jacobi for what they called the “dramatic improvement in the on-time performance of our train.”
They were referring to Train 536, Capitol Corridor’s evening train to Auburn. It is the busiest train in the system. And, until quite recently, it had one of the most dismal on-time records among what was then a generally dismal on-time record for the entire Capitol Corridor system.
For years, CC Riders have been a thorn in UP’s side, regularly lambasting the railroad for shunting passenger trains onto side tracks to give their freight trains priority or for maintaining tracks so poorly that passenger trains were forced to slow to a crawl to pass over them. Because of such factors, on-time rates used to be well below 80 percent.
But things have changed and, in fairness to UP, CC Riders decided to take public notice of that fact. Hence their letter, which was copied to a half-dozen public officials and The Bee editorial page as well.
The latest statistics show that Train 536 had an on-time performance of 94 percent or higher for each of the last four months of 2007, with 100 percent on-time performance for November and December.
Ridership and on-time performance is up all along the Capitol Corridor route. In January, annual ridership hit the 1.5 million passenger mark for the first time, a milestone achieved in part because of more service – the number of round trips increased from 24 to 32 trains a day in September 2006 – and better service. On-time performance is the single most important component of better service, and UP has been crucial to that.
This page has been sharply critical of UP’s shabby treatment of passenger service in the past. The railroad’s turnaround deserves recognition as well.