Another Path to Level Boarding

A complication in Caltrain's coming transition to level boarding is found in the train's bathroom, an amenity that requires equal access for passengers with reduced mobility under ADA regulations. During the procurement and design phase of the EMUs, the original plan was to fit in-vehicle wheelchair lifts to enable passengers with reduced mobility to move between the lower level and mid-level, for level boarding compatibility with future high-speed rail platforms (48" above rail, 73" from track center) and to enable bathroom access regardless of boarding level.

This plan fell apart because of practical considerations of cost and vehicle packaging: the bulky 800-pound capacity lifts would have impeded passenger flows in the lower-level vestibules, without providing any value until some distant future where Caltrain would need to dock at high-level platforms in stations shared with high-speed rail. Even then, the lifts would have been required indefinitely, to provide equal access to the bathroom on the lower level. The idea was so unappetizing that it was scrapped, and Caltrain has since focused its nebulous level-boarding strategy around European-like 550 mm platforms.

The EMUs are nevertheless designed for future conversion to high platforms. A different solution is available that would facilitate a transition to 48" platforms: a new single-level, high-floor bathroom car that would take the eighth slot in the consist. The EMUs were always planned to be eight cars long, as their numbering attests by skipping from 1, 2, 3 to 5, 6. Missing car number 4 could have this configuration, as modified from a Stadler drawing:

The new high-floor bathroom car would triple bathroom capacity of the trainset from one to three bathrooms, provide 60 seats with up to six wheelchair spaces, and enable a gradual transition to 48" level boarding using car-borne wheelchair lifts (such as the FRA and ADA compliant PowerLift by Rincon) to board passengers with reduced mobility from legacy 8" platforms, without the need for precise positioning of train doors relative to mini-high platforms. Once the transition to level boarding is completed, these lifts could be removed.

With the bridge plates already engineered for the EMUs (shown in photo at right but not fitted to the fleet as delivered) passengers with reduced mobility could board step-free without any crew assistance, greatly improving the predictability of dwell times and thereby increasing train speeds and corridor capacity.

The transition to high platforms would then entail the following steps:

• Extend all platforms and yards to support eight-car trains
• Incorporate new single-level bathroom cars to all trains
• Commission high level doors and install bridge plates
• Build new 48" platforms!
  

High platforms have the advantage of compatibility with high-speed rail, enabling any train to dock at any platform as needed and making optimal use of future corridor and station capacity. They allow high-speed trains to make stops at important places like Redwood City or Palo Alto with zero additional infrastructure. They allow Caltrain to operate like BART, with brief and predictable station dwell times, something that remains out of reach today even as our swift and modern EMUs must wait for extended periods at low platforms, in the manner of a Ferrari driven on a rutted dirt road.

Three Next Steps

Caltrain's exhaustive business plan effort has resulted in a long range service vision for how to grow the railroad to the year 2040, recently adopted by the board as official policy. This is the mountain we wish to climb. How do we climb it? One step at a time. In fact, with electrified service now unlikely to begin before 2023, there is extra time to plan and execute three next steps.

Step One: Extend Platforms

The biggest short-term constraint to growing Caltrain capacity is  limited platform length. The new EMUs will be 685 feet long when extended to eight cars, too long for many existing platforms. The existing platform lengths are shown in the graphic at right (source), with the required extensions to 700 feet highlighted in orange. The diagram shows the year of construction of each platform, proving that Caltrain is a champion of platform construction, having poured about five linear miles of new platforms over the last two decades. The amount missing is about 3500 linear feet, or a bit over two years' worth of average platform production. There are a couple of tight spots boxed in by grade crossings, most notably Burlingame (767 feet between pedestrian crossings), but most locations have plenty of space.

Longer platforms enable the operation of 7-car diesel express trains, each with about 950 seats. While diesel trains don't feature prominently in future plans, they can still fill an important interim role once they become freed up by the arrival of the EMU fleet. The diesels can easily handle longer trains. It may not look good to continue belching diesel fumes, but it gets the job done at far lower emissions per passenger-mile than by forcing unmet demand to drive instead.

At the recent going rate of 7 to 10 thousand dollars per linear foot of platform, including all capital project overheads, the entire job should cost in the range of $25 - $35 million. For perspective, that's a percent or two of the modernization budget. This project is within reach of Caltrain's existing resources and is now official policy under section (1).E.ii of the service vision. There is no plausible excuse for not undertaking it immediately, to finish by 2023 concurrently with the start of electrified revenue service.

Step Two: Add 8th Car to EMU Fleet

The EMU order currently stands at 19 seven-car trains. The seventh car was ordered in a recent exercise of an option on the original contract, at an average price of $4.7 million per car. Assuming 10% price escalation, another 19 cars to extend this fleet to 8 cars would cost about $100M. This is a large sum, but one that could be scraped together over the next year or so if some high-speed rail funding gets re-allocated to interconnected "book end" projects.

The eighth car represents a significant step up in capacity: since it has no traction equipment cabinets, bike spaces or bathrooms, it has room for a whopping 132 seats, bringing seated capacity per EMU from 667 to 799, a 20% increase. So, for an extra 5% of the modernization budget, you buy an extra 20% capacity. This should be undertaken as soon as possible.

From an emissions point of view, ordering the eighth car is far preferable to ordering additional 7-car EMU formations to displace the diesel fleet sooner. Growing the fleet before fully replacing it provides a short-term peak-hour capacity boost that will remove traffic from roads and alleviate congestion, easily offsetting the emissions of the small remaining diesel-hauled fleet. Going all-electric sooner sounds "green" if you look at Caltrain in isolation, but keeping some diesels in the short term is greener when considering the overall transportation system of which Caltrain is a part, which is what ultimately matters for the air we breathe. Seven-car diesels can be used exclusively in express service, where fewer stops and starts (which are dreadfully slow with diesel) pose less of a time penalty.

There is the small wrinkle of where to park these longer trains when they are not in service. CEMOF, the maintenance facility in San Jose, currently stores two trains end-to-end on four 1200-foot sidings where two longer trains (EMU-8 at 685 ft, or diesel+7 at 664 ft) won't fit. This means at least four trains will need to be stored somewhere else, presumably at San Francisco or San Jose, as was the practice before CEMOF was built. In a real pinch, trains can be stored during the off-peak in the controlled sidings south of Redwood Junction, with certain shoulder-of-peak trains originating and terminating at Redwood City to avoid long deadhead moves.

Step Three: Accelerate Planning for Level Boarding

Level boarding (discussed extensively on this blog) decreases trip times, improves punctuality, increases crew productivity per hour of labor, and increases the frequency of service that can be provided by a train fleet of a given size. While Caltrain's embrace of the concept has been hesitant, it is now policy under the same section (1).E.ii of the service vision adopted by the board. The next step is to get serious about planning how to actually do it, because it is a far more complicated problem than it first appears.

Caltrain staff have decided to forgo boarding using the high-level doors, and recently issued a change order to have the EMU fleet delivered with these doors replaced by plug panels. Level boarding will happen with European-style 550 mm platforms, which can't be a bad thing, although accessibility requirements are more difficult to meet in the United States. The trick is then how to get there, and how to end up with a level boarding solution that doesn't require crew assistance whenever a person of reduced mobility needs to board or alight, in the current inefficient fashion of Northeastern railroads.

The trains will require a boarding step arrangement that deploys to serve either 8-inch legacy platforms (using a drop step mechanism) or to close the gap to newly raised 550 mm platforms, during an extended transition period where some stations may have been modified before others. Due to a lack of foresight on Caltrain's part, this capability is not available on the new EMUs as procured. The EMUs will need to be retrofitted with new three-position step modules (presumably engineered by Stadler's step supplier, Bode / Schaltbau) roughly like this:

The primary engineering challenge is to meet the ADA horizontal gap requirement in Position 2, which is 3 inches maximum (in current law) and is planned to be reduced to 2 inches. The step mechanism must also deploy to the correct height without crew intervention.

The platforms will need to be raised by a bit less than 14 inches, preferably without demolishing and starting over. One intriguing way to do this cheaply and with minimal service disruption would be to re-use the existing platforms as a slab foundation, with drainage, electrical grounding and bonding, and utilities staying as they are. The platforms would first be fitted with prefabricated adjustable edge modules. An adjustable platform edge that can be jacked to the correct height at initial installation and periodically adjusted during maintenance (e.g. after track tamping) is an unavoidable requirement of meeting the demanding ADA gap specifications for unassisted level boarding.

View of a single six-foot-long 550-mm platform edge module installed on a legacy 8” platform

After suitable modifications to platform amenities, the remaining area of the platform would be raised using lightweight expanded polystyrene fill (Geofoam) and modular pavers. The pavers cover the temporary boarding step that is integral to each edge module, which is no longer needed. The resiliency of the resulting platform structure enables periodic adjustment of the platform edge jackscrews to maintain compliance with the ADA gap criteria.

The modular construction technique with edge modules and pavers lends itself to rapid “blitz” construction schedules, since no platform concrete curing is necessary. After each night's construction, the platform can be left in a usable state for the next day's service, avoiding the logistical complications of closing entire platforms during construction.

Regardless of the technical solution ultimately adopted, level boarding starts with a robust planning process to define the problem and consider all the engineering approaches. This planning process is not expensive, and it needs to be funded and staffed now that level boarding is policy.

State of Good Design

Railroad operating departments work hard to achieve and maintain what is known in industry lingo as a state of good repair (SOGR). If that's all that Caltrain is going to do in the next decade, electrification will fall flat, like a sort of MBTA with pantographs on top. We have a chance to move beyond the narrow commuter-rail SOGR mindset, striving for something far bigger: a state of good design. The three next steps described here are a small way to get started right now on the way to the visionary service improvements described in Caltrain's business plan.

Emergency Exit Fail

Caltrain's new EMU train cars have an unusual configuration with two sets of doors. The lower level doors will be used at existing Caltrain stations, while the intermediate level doors (above the wheels at the ends of each car) are intended to be used at an undetermined date in the 2030s once these trains begin sharing stations with California high-speed rail, which will use high-floor trains and high platforms with boarding at about 50" above the rail. The California High-Speed Rail Authority, which Caltrain cryptically refers to as "external stakeholders," required this design feature as a condition of funding Caltrain's modernization to the tune of $750M, to maintain the option of sharing platforms at future HSR stations in San Francisco, Millbrae and San Jose.

The Original Plan

To maximize the short-term seating capacity of the new trains until the 2030s, Caltrain specified that the intermediate level should have temporary flip-up seats installed in front of the unused doors, five per door vestibule, with the seating blocking off the doors like this:

Configuration of intermediate level in A, B, C, E, and G cars

Because EMU cars are filled with electrical cabinets (labeled with yellow lightning bolts), the seating capacity of the train is reduced compared to a conventional train. This is the price you pay for not having a locomotive; all the bits that make the train go still need to find a place, which makes for a challenging packaging problem in a bi-level train. The reduced seating capacity of the train has been controversial and makes these temporary seats quite important. For each 7-car train, there are 70 of these intermediate level flip-up seats that make up a non-trivial 10% of the overall seating capacity of 667.

At some undetermined future date when the intermediate doors would be needed for compatibility with high platforms, the blue flip-up seating modules would be removed from the intermediate level.

A Regulatory Conundrum

In the design of any new train, federal safety regulations require that any passenger seating compartment be fitted with at least two emergency exit windows (for passenger egress) and two rescue access windows (for first responder ingress). The intermediate level counts as a passenger compartment because these flip-up seats are located within it. However, the intermediate level does not have what regulations consider to be a window; the only opening to the outside is through the doors. This set up a conflict with safety regulations.

In late 2017, Caltrain petitioned the Federal Railroad Administration for a waiver (docket FRA-2018-0003) by arguing that the emergency release feature of the doors would provide an equivalent level of safety, despite not meeting the letter of the regulation, allowing emergency access by climbing over the seat backs.

In June 2018, the FRA denied Caltrain's request because the flip-up seating installed longitudinally such that it blocks the doors could impede egress and access and therefore did not meet the intent of the regulation. The FRA stated that "the absence of need for these intermediate level doors to support current revenue boarding and alighting requirements does not negate the necessity for an unobstructed path in the event of an emergency." Curiously, this unobstructed path requirement applies only to doors, not to windows!

Implicitly, Solution A is to remove all seating from the intermediate level of the affected cars, which effectively sidesteps the emergency window requirement. But given that seating in Caltrain's EMUs is already quite limited, this solution seems like a non-starter as it would reduce seating capacity of a 7-car train by 9% from 667 seats to just 617 seats.

Solution A: not a passenger seating compartment

The FRA helpfully suggested some other possibilities.

Solution B: equip the intermediate level doors with a regulation-size emergency window of minimum dimensions 26" wide by 24" high. Unfortunately, that is too large for the dual-leaf design of the train doors; in other words, the window in each door leaf is too narrow to function as an emergency window.

Solution B: the minimum clear opening is too big for dual-leaf doors

Solution C: replace the intermediate level doors with a plug panel (essentially, a structural wall panel that does not function as a door) fitted with a regulation-size emergency window of minimum dimensions 26" wide by 24" high, until such time as the door-blocking seating is removed, the panel is removed, and the doors and platform bridge plates are re-installed.

Solution C: doors replaced by plug panels

Caltrain is now in the process of pursuing Solution C, plug panels. This change order is expected to cost about $4 million total up front, about $30000 per car, or $7000 per door. When intermediate-level doors are required a decade or more from now, a net sum of approximately another $10 million ($14 million future installation cost to be set aside, minus $4 million of door maintenance savings) would be needed to retrofit them. That is a LOT of money for a change that fundamentally reduces and complicates compatibility with HSR stations and platforms.

Other Solutions

There are other solutions that strike a better balance of functionality and simplicity without a seven-figure cost impact.

Solution D: short of removing all the seating from the intermediate level vestibule, the regulations require only one emergency window (instead of two) if there are four or fewer seats in the compartment. Removing seats from one side only and applying for a new waiver to allow unobstructed use of one of the doors in lieu of a single emergency window could work, addressing the FRA's stated concern with door obstruction. This would reduce seating capacity of a 7-car train by just 22 seats or 3% (5 seats lost in cars A and B, and 4 seats lost in cars C, E and G).

Solution D: reduced seating with unobstructed emergency access

Solution E: reconfigure the mounting bracket for the flip-up seating so that seats flip up and out of the way of the doors when not used, allowing the unimpeded use of both doors in lieu of emergency windows. This solution requires applying for a new waiver to allow the use of doors in lieu of emergency windows, but also addresses the FRA's stated concern with door obstruction. Placing the flip up seats in this manner would reduce the clear width of the door opening by a couple of inches on each side, from 51" to about 47", with no reduction to seating capacity.

Solution E: change flip-up seating orientation to provide unobstructed door access
(flip-up seats are shown in use; they fold flush against wall when not occupied)

Solution E would require no modifications whatsoever when the intermediate level doors are needed in the future, and could be implemented at all doors throughout the train including the lower level, adding seating capacity. Seats placed in doorways may sound like a bad idea, but in a crowded train, social signaling fairly quickly communicates to occupants of these seats that it's time to stand up and make way. This is the French "strapontin" seating in common use on some of the busiest rail lines in Paris:

Flip-up seats in a doorway of a brand new Bombardier EMU on Paris RER line D.
(foreground at left) credit: Wikipedia / KiHa 52

Indeed, the photo above, taken inside the same Bombardier EMU often vaunted in front of the Caltrain board by a certain member of the public as having so much more seating than Stadler's EMU, shows one of the secrets of achieving very high seating densities: flip-up seating in all doorways. The other three secrets are five-abreast seating, not having as much space dedicated to bikes, and lower acceleration performance that requires fewer electrical cabinets, leaving more space for seats. After adjusting for these four factors, it turns out that the Bombardier EMU provides no higher seating density than the Stadler EMU.

Ultimately, it is entirely possible that Caltrain simply does not wish to interface with high-speed rail in any station as a matter of policy, because it would require sharing and collaborating with another agency, and solving a somewhat complicated ADA compliance problem. Which agency would voluntarily bring that upon itself? Caltrain already took the HSR money, and installing plugs will "erase" the clunky and unpalatable concession they made in the name of compatibility, with the further bonus of not requiring another run at the FRA for a new waiver. The complicated ADA compliance issues associated with interior lifts are kicked as far down the road as possible!

No matter how you look at it, Caltrain's chosen approach is a ~$15 million mistake that reduces and complicates compatibility with HSR stations and platforms. There are cheaper, simpler and easier ways to achieve compliance with emergency window regulations. It's not too late to change course.

Growing Caltrain into an 8-Lane Freeway

Caltrain can and should become an eight-lane freeway. Not like an ugly concrete scar tearing loudly through the landscape, but in terms of throughput capacity in people per hour. Today, Caltrain already carries the equivalent of nearly 3 freeway lanes, and more than doubling the system's capacity is hardly a moonshot. For perspective, BART's Transbay Tube carries up to 27000 people per hour, almost double the entire capacity of the Bay Bridge with its ten freeway lanes.

More than doubling Caltrain's capacity has been proposed before and is now being studied by the agency itself, after a decade of not thinking much past electrification.

Capacity calculations can be controversial and rely on many details and assumptions, so the suggested path to expand Caltrain ridership from 3 to 8 lanes of freeway-equivalent is provided in the form of a spreadsheet, embedded below. You can dig into all the numbers and assumptions for each capacity increase and see the underlying formulas for yourself, down to the detailed number of seats in each train car, to understand how it all adds up.

This is a living document, and feedback is appreciated!

Freeway Lanes of Caltrain

If everyone drove instead of taking Caltrain, how many more lanes would peninsula freeways need to absorb the additional traffic?

The way to answer this question is to count how many train passengers ride past any given location, in each direction, within the span of one hour. Caltrain publishes all the information you need to do this calculation rigorously, without making any assumptions: the timetable tells you when each train passes each location, and the 2016 weekday passenger count by train tells you how many people are on board that train at that time.

Four cases are considered: morning northbound, evening northbound, morning southbound, and evening southbound. Rather than picking a fixed morning and evening hour over which to count passengers, we slide a one-hour window across the peak period until we find the peak hour at each location, during which the most passengers ride past. Caltrain operates five trains per hour per direction repeating on an hourly cadence, so we never count more than five trains in the totals.

It is an easy but tedious calculation, perfectly suited for a computer.  This is what pops out:

This graph reveals many of the features noted in ridership reports: the flow is asymmetrical with more riders traveling northbound AM / southbound PM, the Gilroy branch is dead, Stanford generates enormous ridership, etc.

Translation to Freeway Lanes

To convert the number of Caltrain passengers into freeway lanes, very few assumptions are needed, and those we need can be backed up by references.

1. A congested freeway lane operating at 45 mph can carry 2000 passenger cars per hour, according to the Federal Highway Administration's HPMS Field Manual (Parameter values: FFS = 45 mph, BaseCap = 2150 pcphpl, PHF = 0.95, fHV = 0.98, fp = 1.0).
    
2. The average vehicle occupancy (AVO) is 1.3 people, based on two studies of the 101 corridor in San Mateo County. This figure includes buses, van pools and corporate shuttles.

This means a single freeway lane can theoretically carry 2600 people in one hour. Note this is a very optimistic figure because slight perturbations in the flow of traffic can cause slow-downs that reduce throughput due to lower free flow speed (FFS). But we'll use this very high number to make an extremely conservative estimate of how many lanes of freeway can carry all of Caltrain's ridership.

Freeway lanes typically do not change directions to accommodate peak flows. That means we must consider northbound lanes separately from southbound lanes, with no possibility of re-allocating the lane capacity to accommodate the AM/PM flow asymmetry that is observed on Caltrain. In practice, this means we must add the northbound peak flow (AM or PM, whichever is highest) to the southbound peak flow (again the highest of AM or PM) to size the number of equivalent freeway lanes. Looking at the graph above, which shows the highest flow is northbound AM and southbound PM, we must add AM northbound and PM southbound people per hour, and divide by 2600 people per hour per freeway lane. Here is the result:

So as of 2016, plain old diesel Caltrain equals about 2.5 lanes of freeway, including both directions. If you integrate the area under this curve, you get how many lane-miles of freeway would be needed to replace Caltrain. That number is 119 lane-miles. These are very conservative lower bounds.

When you hear the argument that "millions" of people use highway 101 but only about 30,000 people use Caltrain, shut it down with facts: today Caltrain amounts to 2.5 / 8 or at least 30% of the lane capacity of highway 101 during rush hour. The reply might be that not all those people would end up on 101, but with an average trip length of 23 miles, which driver wouldn't use a freeway?

Future Capacity Implications

Caltrain capacity is set to increase considerably, first by ~30% with the initial electrification and modernization project, and by ~60% once the system is running at 6 trains per hour with 8 cars each. (If you don't count standees, those figures are ~10% and ~25%, but why would you not count standees?) A 60% capacity increase is equivalent to one and a half lanes added to the entire length of highway 101 from San Jose to San Francisco.

It doesn't have to stop there: more trains per hour and longer trains are possible, because EMU trains scale up in a way that diesel can't. A future Caltrain capacity increase to about 10,000 passengers per peak hour per direction (about triple today's throughput) isn't out of the question, does not require adding tracks or expanding the rail corridor, and would equate to adding 5 new freeway lanes.

In certain quarters of Silicon Valley that are enamored of Hyperloops, self-driving Teslas and Boring underground tunnels, electric Caltrain is looked down upon as a last-century technology that is about to be made obsolete. That particular outlook fails to grasp the importance of throughput or to recognize the enormous carrying capacity of modern electric rail. Self-driving Teslas and Hyperloops will achieve dismal throughput capacity as measured in passengers per hour, and no amount of whiz-bang technology will change the underlying geometry of this increasingly urban region.

The way forward is to add more freeway lanes of Caltrain.

CalMod 1.1

This being Silicon Valley, future plans for Caltrain modernization are known as CalMod 2.0, the next big thing beyond the CalMod 1.0 improvements that are already under contract.

CalMod 2.0 is a list of future improvements worth about $750M that includes:

• Full fleet conversion to 8-car EMUs ($440M)
• Broadband connectivity ($30M)
• Maintenance facility improvements ($36M)
• Level boarding and platform extensions ($250M)

In the grand scheme of things, these aren't outrageous expenses ("only" another 38% over and above the $2B tab for CalMod 1.0), but they're not cheap, either. To meet capacity challenges in the short term, possibly concurrently with delivery of CalMod 1.0, perhaps some of these expenses can be moved up to realize the maximum bang for the buck as soon as 2021.

CalMod 1.1 would consist of just two line items:

1) Lengthen EMUs to 8 cars, for $145M

The EMU fleet for CalMod 1.0 consists of sixteen 6-car trains, with a reduced seating capacity of 558 that has caused much yammering amid the increasing load factors during peak commute hours. Even without a ridership bump from the "new and modern" effect, it is likely these trains will be packed from day one. Now is the time to start doing something about it.

Seating layout for two extra cars (based on Stadler brochure)
Two unpowered cars would seat up to 264 passengers.

The contract with Stadler includes an option for another 96 cars priced at $390M, a figure larded up to $440M in the CalMod 2.0 total presumably due to the usual procurement overheads. This figure is for 100% fleet replacement, with all the remaining diesel consists being retired. In the short term, only 1/3rd of the option cars would need to be exercised; this involves purchasing 32 cars or 2 extra cars for each of the sixteen EMU consists in the CalMod 1.0 order.

The per-train capacity will increase by well over 200 seats per train, back to a level that will mitigate peak hour crowding. However, 8-car EMUs will exceed the length of many of the existing platforms.

2) Extend platforms to a minimum length of 700 feet, for $25M

Platform extensions are relatively cheap to build, especially when you don't need to rebuild the entire length of station platforms as would be needed for level boarding. You can leave vertical circulation (stairs, ramps) and amenities (vending machines, lighting, benches, PA system, departure boards, etc.) alone and just tack on a short length of concrete, and perhaps move a pedestrian crossing. Caltrain excels at building platforms and has done so extensively, pouring some 5 linear miles of platforms over the last 18 years!

The length of Caltrain's existing platforms is documented in this schematic of California rail systems. To dock an 8-car EMU, platforms need to be extended to at least 700 feet. The necessary extension lengths are graphed at right; labels show the year of completion of each platform's construction.

The total amount of platform extension required to operate 8-car EMUs is approximately 3500 feet. This figure excludes Hillsdale and South San Francisco, both of which are already slated to be rebuilt to 700 feet. Each foot of platform costs about $7000 to build, on the basis of a typical $10M cost for two 700-foot platforms from past platform reconstruction projects. Therefore, the tab for extending all platforms to 700 feet (for the time being, at their current height of 8 inches) lies in the range of $25M.

Start Planning Now

The bottom line: another $175M or an extra 9% investment over CalMod 1.0 yields an extra 23% peak hour seated capacity for CalMod 1.1. It would be best to start planning for CalMod 1.1 now, and to turn CalMod 2.0 into the big level boarding project for the 2020s. In software parlance, the CalMod 1.1 patch should be applied immediately upon release of CalMod 1.0.