SAN JOSE, Calif. — San Jose’s historic tree-lined Lenzen Avenue area is preparing for a new and unwanted neighbor: a 24-acre maintenance yard that will handle almost two-thirds of the Bay Area’s commuter trains, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
But residents believe the Caltrain operation will generate less noise, pollution and traffic than they feared. Unable to stop the maintenance yard from moving in, they joined a city-sponsored negotiating team that made 39 proposals to adapt the yard to its neighborhood setting. Caltrain accepted all but two of the proposals and added a few of its own.
San Jose officials are calling the agreement unprecedented because residents were included as negotiators, not just as advisers. The agreement also sets up a permanent oversight committee to monitor the plant, which will handle 25 locomotives and 110 coaches when it opens in 2005.
Among the key provisions of the agreement: limiting the noisiest work to daylight hours, requiring a sound wall, enclosing the maintenance building, adjusting operations to minimize traffic jams, providing an alternative power source to keep engines warm without overnight idling, and putting diesel fuel storage as far away from residents as possible.
The San Jose City Council is expected to approve the agreement on Tuesday, and the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board, which manages Caltrain, will vote on it Thursday.
Residents are still unsure whether the agreement will dilute the 24-hour operation’s impact enough to keep the neighborhood’s character.
“I hope that what we’ve done will be adequate to protect us,” said Kay Gutknecht, a member of the resident task force appointed by Mayor Ron Gonzales in 1999. “If it’s not, I think we will see a deterioration in the neighborhood.”
Residents such as Suzette Sumang, who with her husband Vince organized an unsuccessful effort to stop the project, already expect just that. They plan to leave the area and know other neighbors who have sold or are selling their homes.
“We’re talking about a diesel engine train yard that’s going to operate 24 hours a day,” she said. “They’re kidding themselves. This is going to be loud, it’s going to be obnoxious and people are going to be shocked when it goes in.”
Gutknecht and other task force members acknowledge that the best solution would be to put the $67 million facility somewhere else. But when it became clear that Caltrain believed Lenzen Avenue was the best site because of its central location and cost, they went to work to see what Caltrain would do for them.
“You have to get past the screaming and weigh what are the real issues and what are the possibilities,” Gutknecht said.
The site, a former Southern Pacific railroad yard, will contain a building about 1,000 feet long, 100 feet wide and 50 feet high. Daily activities will include inspection, minor repairs, oil and filter changes, wheel replacement, and wheel “rounding” to prevent friction. The trains also will be washed, fueled and “sanded,” adding material that provides better traction for stopping.
Caltrain has long needed a centralized location to service the trains that carry 34,000 people a day around the Bay Area. Maintenance operations are in San Francisco, San Jose and Gilroy.
“We are in between a rock and a hard place,” said Caltrain spokesman Jayme Maltbie. “We’re running a commuter railroad in a very heavily populated part of the Bay Area. We need to have access to a maintenance facility and storage yard that will cover all our needs.”
Although an environmental assessment determined that the maintenance yard would have no significant impact on the area, there’s no quiet way to test engines and horns. Caltrain did not have to negotiate, but decided that it was in its best interests to talk with its worried new neighbors, who already are disrupted by noise from San Jose’s nearby airport.
“One of the legacies of this process is Caltrain is much more sensitive to all of the neighborhoods we encroach upon,” Maltbie said.
The biggest win for the neighborhood, Gutknecht said, was a partial curfew of noisy maintenance operations. The 30-minute load tests, in which locomotive engines are revved up to their highest speeds, will only be done twice a month between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. Caltrain rejected a complete nighttime curfew because of the number of trains that must be serviced.
Other neighborhood wins: A 24-hour complaint line, train car body repairs limited to daytime hours, no engine run-ups or horn checks after 11 p.m., and trains departing before 6:30 a.m. will be stored overnight at the Diridon and Tamien stations, their departure points.