Today, the California Transportation Commission approved the allocation of funds from an $80 million award from the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA) for one battery-equipped electric multiple unit train (BEMU) and the associated R&D so that Caltrain will be operable with zero-emission trains on both electrified service area of the corridor as well as the portion of the corridor from Tamien Station in San Jose to Gilroy that does not yet have overhead electrified lines.
- California Transportation Commission, 17th Aug 2023
For reasons that make no sense to me, the California Transportation Commission (Caltrain) only last year in 2023, decided that it was going to roll out battery equipped electric trains. This was heralded in various news outlets like the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronical to great aplomb as this "First-in-the-Nation" double decker electric train was zero emission at the train itself and would be the beginning of the transition to a fully electrified service.
Why I find this so mind-bendingly crazy is that in London, companies like the City & South London Railway, and Underground Electric Railways Ltd., had begun to install electric railways in London in 1890:
"By eighteen-ninety, we'd enough,
Of smoky trains that went puff-puff,
And so we have perfection found,
The bright electric Underground."
Admittedly England was relatively slow on the uptake of electrifying its regional lines but other nations such as France, Germany, Japan, and even places like China have gone full steam ahead into the future at two hundred miles an hour. In Sydney and NSW, we have had electric Suburban and Regional services now, beginning in about 1923. It seems to me that the United States, which is a hyper-capitalist paradise, should have embraced electric trains everywhere as a way of reducing input costs for moving freight around and that smaller passenger services like Amtrak and Caltrain, should have already got on board with electric trains.
Instead, American railways while being hyper-capitalist, are so cost averse to building new infrastructure, that the lines that most railways run on, are for the most part legacy pieces from at least 90 to 150 years ago. Caltrain in shining the light with its bona-fide electrified Bi-Level Dual Battery and Electric trains, is having to make its own tracks in creating and upgrading new infrastructure, charging facilities, and related maintenance yards. About the only thing that it does not need to do, is invent the BEMUs themselves because it can and has bought off the shelf equipment.
Again, I do not understand why Caltrain has gone for Stadler's KISS trains, when it could have gone for smaller pieces from Siemens, or CRRC. Those Stadler KISS BEMUs are chunky chunky hefty bois, being as much as 15'7" tall; which is insanity when you consider that the A-Set, B-Set, D-Set et cetera trains in Sydney, which are also bi-level EMUs, are only 14'9" all. That 8 inches might not sound like a lot but when you have to bore every tunnel for hundreds and hundreds of miles, and dirt is excavated to the third power of measurement, and load capacity which is needed to carry bigger trains is imposed to the fourth power of measurement per wheel (because this is a squared power times a squared power), then this is a lot more investment needed.
I know very well that the Comeng/Downer EDI/CRRC trains in Sydney, would have worked exceptionally well in California because they already work exceptionally well in Sydney and NSW, where they are already made to climb into mountains and run for hundreds of kilometers. We also already know that they work excellently in regional and commuter applications because that's the job that they already fulfil.
Nevertheless, the Stadler KISS BEMUs which Caltrain have taken delivery of, look pretty neat. There is a different kind of packaging decision which has been taken with regards the placement of stairs and vestibule areas; which seems to be a result of California having very low platforms and needing to have roll-on/roll-off abilities to be able to cater for people with mobility needs. This means that the doors look like they are in the wrong spot by my way of thinking but quite frankly I can take a flying leap off of a short platform. I do not know how tall pantograph heights are relative to the train but I am sure that all of this will have been worked out too.
My grand hope for the United States is that these KISS trains are a roaring success. America as once the leader in futurism has since about the time of Reagan, decided that it wants to be anti-modern. The nation that was once able to put men on the moon, has been scrobbling around in the rust of its future's past, now the actual past. Great names such as the Burlington, Santa Fe, Union Pacific, have all been faced up to computer driven commodity hell as trucks and air travel have eaten their lunch. Airlines also tended to drive trains off the tracks and buses into second class jokes. These KISS trains look really really neat though. I don't know how nice they're going to look in 2060 but that's the kind of age that the first of the Tangaras in Sydney are now, and they still look really really neat.
For reasons that make less than no sense to me, the Californian Government aided and abetted by the US Federal Government, thinks that cars are actually a better idea and devote all manner of space to the worship of the car in the United States. Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Diego is the most trafficked road in the world but even then at best, it can only manage 2400 cars per lane per hour. This means to say that for most of the Interstate highways across Los Angeles, even though they know about trains, they refuse to use them. This is madness.
I live in Sydney which is an ocean away both physically and culturally. The space taken up by a four lane railway line, is generally narrower than the space required to build a four lane Interstate. During peak hour from where I live out in the bogan Western Suburbs, we have a four minute service from Blacktown to the City. This is because Blacktown as an interchange station has connecting services from both the Western Line, the Richmond Line, and the Blue Mountains Line. A four minute service, with seating space only is about 800 people per train; which equates to 12,000 people per hour. To get that kind of capacity in cars on the Interstate, every single car would need to have six people per car and the truth is that the majority of then only have one person per car.
As a city comparable in size to Sydney, and now having seen the tech of bi-level electric trains (which we have had in Sydney since the 1960s) in California, maybe they might be ready to take a step into the 1970s? I think it insane that if Sydney's train network were in the United States, it would be second only behind the New York Subway in size; despite and inspite of the United States having many megaopolises bigger than Sydney. I find it more insane that the internal shuttle train network in Walt Disney World in Florida is on the top ten of the biggest mass transport networks in America. The fact that public transport is so anaemic in the United States that that is a thing, is monumentally stupid.
Caltrain's new Stadler KISS BEMUs could be modified to just be purely EMUs, or even just adopt anything by Downer EDI, or CRRC, or Siemens, and run in tunnels under the Interstate if the thought of ripping them up is traumatic. Granted that the initial investment would be big but you'd only have to do that once. As it is, the Eisenhower Interstate System of Defense Highways was already the largest piece of socialist infrastructure in the history of the world and as much as American's love to yell "I don't want socialism", that's how their dinner gets to them.
It should therefore be more or less a fait accompli to just demolish four lanes of traffic from every Interstate in Los Angeles (5, 10, 15, 405, 110 et cetera) and install railway lines everywhere. Quite apart from the fact that it is magnitudes more efficient to move people together via trains, the argument can be made purely due to the fact that tail-pipe emmissions from the Interstate system in Los Angeles causes a smog so bad so often that you can cut cubes out of it with a bread knife. Caltrain already has the solution to improving air quality in California and quite apart from what you feel about climate change (it's real - it's a hoax: I don't care, have a sook), ask any Angelo whether they actually like sitting in traffic on The 5 and they'll probably look at you with the same kind of incredulity that I look at the idiocy of people sitting on The 5 going nowhere fast.
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