"So when you're doing a wholesale swap out, essentially, of your fleet on a commuter railroad - such as an agency taking 400 diesel buses and overnight going to 400 battery electric - you'd have to figure out something to do with those 400 diesel buses. So that was the conundrum that Caltrain was looking at towards the end of the electrification program. We were beginning to receive these beautiful Stadler electric train sets from Salt Lake City."
"Pretty quickly, we had a space problem on our hands. Caltrain is 53 miles of electrified corridor between San Jose and downtown San Francisco. It's a finite size. There's a finite number of sidings. The maintenance shop in San Jose is only so large and so pretty quickly, you know, it was not going to be a situation where you could just keep the entire diesel fleet sitting there while you had the whole electric fleet on site and then operating."
A wholesale fleet replacement created an immediate disposal challenge for surplus diesel equipment. Caltrain began receiving Stadler electric train sets and faced finite corridor length, limited sidings, and constrained maintenance shop capacity. The electrification program required an overnight operational switch, leaving insufficient room to store both diesel and electric fleets simultaneously. The switch occurred in September, when diesel services were replaced by electric trains between San Jose and San Francisco. As a result, Caltrain needed to part with 93 gallery cars and arrange relocation of surplus diesel rolling stock to other operators, including shipments to Peru.
Read at Streetsblog
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]