TrainBlog by Marcel Marchon

Late last night, I got a phone call from a reporter for the Santa Barbara Newsroom (that site in itself has an interesting story) - she said she was writing a story about Santa Barbara’s plans for commuter rail and Union Pacific and wanted to use one of my pictures on their site. I said, sure, go ahead, and this is the result.

However, the real story is what she says in her article (Commuter Rail to Santa Barbara Faces “Huge Obstacles”): Santa Barbara would like to set up a commuter rail service to Ventura County (Oxnard), but Union Pacific does not want to allow this without double-tracking the line. In fact, they said “Commuter trains on the single-track section between the San Fernando Valley and San Jose might degrade the freight service that Union Pacific is committed to.” Did you notice that? Not “between the San Fernando Valley and Santa Barbara“, no, they said “between the San Fernando Valley and San Jose“. So not only do they not want any new passenger rail service to Santa Barbara, they do not want any new service on the whole Coast Line!

It looks like it has been a bad week for Capitol Corridor riders, due to the fact that Union Pacific had to undertake some urgent bridge replacement work on that route. Here are a couple extract from Gene Skoropowski’s “Message to Riders“:

Then the bottom fell out of the plan. Union Pacific engineering forces discovered major deterioration of two bridges in the middle of the planned tie renewal work area. (…) So, this week, UP bridge forces undertook a major effort to get the bridges replaced. (…) Due to the ongoing bridge replacement, this week has been a colossal mess, especially on the later morning trains and the early afternoon trains. Throw in a few signal problems, a drawbridge opening or two, a couple of vehicles and assorted debris intentionally placed on the tracks, a freight train with a crew that reached its legal ‘hours-of-service’ limit (federal law says the freight train stops when the crew uses up their allotted work hours, and the train then sits on the track until a relief crew can be found and sent out by van, taxi …or helicopter…!!) and we have the basic ingredients for the collapse of service.

I am really amazed by all this. I mean, seriously: do bridges just suddenly go bad from one day to the next (short of something like a washout)? Aren’t they (Union Pacific - they own the track) doing some sort of ongoing maintenance and checks on their trackwork? Shouldn’t they detect issues like that early on? And also, how can a crew just ‘die’ on the road? Shouldn’t the dispatchers, etc. know about this? Wouldn’t it be way more efficient to run all trains in a scheduled manner? They’d be much more predictable that way.

This almost seems like an impossible task for Amtrak and the Capitol Corridor folks: they are trying to run a frequent, scheduled, reliable service, but they have to do that in an environment that is completely unstructured (it appears), unscheduled, unmaintained and thus unreliable.

I also wonder if Amtrak and/or the State of California receives some kind of compensation (at the very least refunds of track usage fees, better would be some kind of money to reimburse for damages) in cases like this? I mean there must be a contract in place that has certain incentives for Union Pacific not to let this happen … I’d be very curious to see this contract …

The Coast Starlight and the California Zephyr were/are not the only trains affected by, ahem, suboptimal dispatching and congestion on Union Pacific tracks - ACE, the Altamont Commuter Express commuter rail operator that runs a line from Stockton over Altamont Pass to San Jose, also reports very bad on-time performance for the month of October and the whole year of 2006:

As of today, the ACE train is running at 52% on-time for the month of October and 77% for the year thus far. This is unacceptable considering Union Pacific’s contractual obligation to dispatch the ACE trains at 95% on-time.

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