Blended Like Oil and Water

The Caltrain-HSR blended proposal, initiated by State Senator Simitian, Congresswoman Eshoo and Assemblymember Gordon to break an impending political impasse on the peninsula rail corridor, has now been evaluated by the HSR Authority's consultants.

Their version of it, submitted in a recent report to the legislature, would cost an astonishing $5.3 billion, even more than the $4.2 billion that the entire peninsula section was estimated to cost back in 2008.  This stunning price tag could have several possible explanations:

1. a repudiation of the blended approach, accomplished by deliberately inflating the budget.
2. an effort to pour the largest possible amount of concrete, regardless of actual operational benefit.
3. sheer engineering incompetence and complete disregard for the new fiscal reality.

A Closer Look At Costs

While the detailed breakdown of that project budget is not provided, it's not too hard to back it out based on what is described.  Here's how it might approximately add up, including project management and contingency costs:

• $0.3 billion to build grade separations at 25th, 28th and 31st Avenues in San Mateo, and to expand the corridor to four tracks from the southern border of San Mateo up to the vicinity of 9th Ave (milepost 18.3), with new four-track stations built at Hillsdale and Hayward Park
• $0.3 billion to expand the existing grade separations in Belmont and San Carlos to four tracks.  This would include new stations built at San Carlos (south of the current location) and Belmont.
• $1.0 billion to fully grade-separate the rail corridor through Redwood City, with expansion to four tracks and an elevated station.  New grade separations would be created at six locations: Whipple, Brewster, Broadway, Maple, Main, and Chestnut.  The new four-track section would tie in to the existing four-track section at Redwood Junction.  Should the Redwood City grade separations be built below grade, costs would be even higher.
• $0.5 billion to burrow a single-track tunnel under the Millbrae station to "save" the existing Caltrain / BART station from complete demolition.  As described in the Alternatives Analysis, the station itself would be re-arranged to accommodate a segregated HSR platform at grade and the southbound Caltrain platform underground.  The tunnel approach would require two new grade separations at Center St. and Santa Paula.
• $1.0 billion to build a six-mile (yes, six miles!) 60-foot tall elevated viaduct from Lawrence Expressway (milepost 40.9) all the way into the upper level of a massive new elevated HSR station complex in San Jose.
• $0.2 billion to demolish existing overpass grade separations at De La Cruz (Santa Clara) and Hedding (San Jose), to be replaced with underpasses to make way for the six-mile viaduct.
• $1.5 billion to electrify the entire corridor, an estimate based on Caltrain's latest electrification budget but discounting the cost of Caltrain's new electric train fleet.
• $0.3 billion for positive train control and technical integration with the HSR system's train control system, which will differ from the PTC solution adopted by Caltrain.
• $0.2 billion for reconfigured station facilities at San Francisco and San Jose.

TOTAL:  $5.3 billion

All of these individual investments must be examined in the context of their operational utility, i.e. the value they add to creating a blended Caltrain / HSR rail corridor that is as flexible and efficient as possible and best meets the service expectation of rail passengers.  And on that basis, most of the above list falls woefully short.

Let's Do Some Value Engineering

• The six-mile (yes, six miles!) 60-foot tall viaduct to approach San Jose adds little operational value compared to cheaper alternatives such as laying additional track at grade from CP Coast (milepost 44.6) into San Jose.  The corridor is mostly 100 feet wide in this area, so the need for a viaduct--let alone a six-mile long viaduct that requires demolishing some perfectly fine grade separations that already exist--is highly questionable.  It is almost an insult to Simitian et al., who specifically requested that aerial structures be minimized.  This viaduct is the outcome of lazy engineering, the sort that avoids inter-agency coordination issues by using megatons of concrete to build over Caltrain, ACE, Amtrak, VTA, BART, UPRR, Caltrans, and everybody else.  Bottom line: with some hard negotiations and minimal takes of a few slivers of industrial property, four tracks can be built at grade all the way into Diridon Station.  Savings: - $1.1 billion
• A four-track mid-peninsula overtake facility is the key enabler of a blended solution. However, the bulk of the cost of this mid-line overtake is a massive Redwood City grade separation project that would eliminate one of the clusters of grade crossings on the peninsula rail corridor.  Is it truly necessary to do so right away in the first phase of the blended project?  Consider these two options:
  1. The CHSRA's proposed overtake facility: 9 miles long with 5 stations (potentially including the HSR stop at Redwood City, which does not help with overtaking)
  2. A somewhat shorter overtake facility: 6.5 miles long ending at Whipple Ave (milepost 24.8) with 4 stations.
  Option 2, while only 3/4 as long, entirely avoids the need to grade-separate an expanded four-track corridor clear through downtown Redwood City.  It also delays a fight against the city's inevitable demands to burrow the rail corridor inside an astronomically expensive tunnel.  The shorter overtake might make operations slightly less flexible and robust, but at the very worst, every Caltrain could be held or slowed for just two minutes to make up for that.  Bottom line: with minor timetable adjustments, the lion's share of the cost of the mid-line overtake can be avoided.  Savings: - $1.0 billion
• The half-billion tunnel in Millbrae is the wrong answer to the question of how to fit four Caltrain / HSR tracks through this station.  The entire Millbrae complex, including 3000-car parking garage, cost about $100 million in today's dollars.  Portions of it can be torn down and reconfigured with four tracks at grade for far less than that sum.  Bottom line: whatever the engineering constraints, you simply don't build a $500 million tunnel to "save" a $100 million station--at worst, you tear it down and start over.  Savings: - $0.4 billion
• The need to integrate Caltrain's CBOSS train control system with the HSR train control system will drive unnecessary costs, most likely resulting in what is known as "dual fitment" of train-borne signaling equipment.  Each high-speed train, California-wide, would need to be fitted with CBOSS hardware and software, with the appropriate interfaces to allow a seamless change-over when entering or leaving exclusive HSR tracks.  This is not a trivial expense, since safety-critical signaling computers approach the cost of aircraft avionics.  Bottom line: deploy ERTMS, not CBOSS.  Savings: - $0.2 billion

TOTAL SAVINGS: $2.7 billion

The very bottom line is this: we can get 95% of the bang for 50% of the buck.  Somebody needs to inject a little bit of sanity into the planning process if a blended solution is ever going to be feasible, if for no other reason that in these times, affordability determines feasibility.  That's why the CHSRA's proposal for the blended system is a disgrace, larded as it is with operationally dubious viaducts, tunnels, bridges and underpasses; in short, a project dreamed up by civil engineers writing their own checks.

Meanwhile, in Rio...

It finally happened.

Last Thursday, Caltrain's board authorized the award of the first phase of a $138,135,673 contract to Parsons Transportation Group to design, procure and install the Caltrain-specified CBOSS train control system (see staff presentation).  This Parsons contract forms the lion's share of a total project budget variously reported as $231 million to $251 million, or a whopping $5 million per route-mile.  According to a project schedule, the final acceptance of the system is planned for February of 2016 (52 months from now), but that assumed contract award at the May board meeting (5 months ago).

Viewed in the framework of the U.S. transportation industrial complex, where public agencies such as Caltrain transfer huge sums of taxpayer dollars to large private corporations that thrive on custom-engineering, re-engineering and over-engineering everything, this contract is business as usual, and Caltrain will probably end up, years late and millions over budget, with a partially functional PTC system.  That sets the stage for more years and millions spent to make it work with high-speed rail.

Meanwhile, in Rio...

Meet SuperVia, a commuter rail operator in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  SuperVia is one busy system, even busier than BART.  Here's a quick comparison between Caltrain and SuperVia:

	Caltrain	SuperVia
Route Miles	77	140
Routes	1	5
Trains	about 25	about 160
Stations	31	89
Weekday Ridership	~45,000	~540,000

Like Caltrain, SuperVia is modernizing.  Among other improvements, SuperVia is installing a sophisticated positive train control system to enforce speed limits, prevent collisions, and reduce the headways between trains.  Unlike Caltrain, SuperVia chose to adapt their requirements to what suppliers already had on the shelf, and is procuring an ERTMS Level 1 overlay system from Bombardier Transportation through a contract worth 125 million Real, or about US $70 million.  (Note that the unknown scope of this contract makes it difficult to compare directly to CBOSS; for example, Bombardier's contract is unlikely to include the train-borne components.)  ERTMS, to remind everyone, is a train control standard that is quickly catching on worldwide, except here in the protected U.S. signaling market.

ERTMS Level 1 is exactly the sort of standardized train control system that would be transparently compatible with high-speed rail, which will most likely operate on its own dedicated high-speed trackage using ERTMS Level 2, a much more sophisticated version of the standard that does away with wayside signals.

The kicker?  Bombardier promises to put this new overlay signaling system into service on SuperVia's various lines from November 2012 to July 2013.  Here's how that stacks up against Caltrain's CBOSS:

	Caltrain CBOSS	SuperVia ERTMS
Contract award	October 2011	May 2011
Initial service entry	October 2015	November 2012
Final delivery	February 2016	July 2013
Time from award to initial service	48 months	18 months
Time from award to final delivery	52 months	26 months

It's too late now to do anything about CBOSS, but it sure will be interesting to see what PTG and Bombardier will deliver for each respective rail system.  Can PTG and Caltrain come up with an ersatz-ERTMS by 2015 for the promised sum?

Port Scores Pork

The Port of San Francisco recently received $3 million from the FRA to upgrade the 1-mile Quint Street lead track that connects the port to the peninsula rail corridor.  The government's press release states (with emphasis added) :

Port of San Francisco, California – Quint Street Yard Track and Signal Improvements – $2,970,000 to improve an approximately one mile-long spur connecting a Caltrain mainline track to the San Francisco Rail Yard. The mainline is under consideration for use as part of the California high-speed rail project, and the current condition of the spur track limits the frequency, weight and length of trains that can use the track, causing delays. The improvements will allow freight trains to operate at higher speeds and clear the mainline more quickly, significantly reducing delays to Caltrain commuter trains and future high-speed rail trains.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Caltrain has been granted a waiver of compliance from certain FRA crashworthiness regulations that enables the operation of lightweight electric rolling stock from European manufacturers.  The same waiver would presumably be extended to any high-speed trains that might use the peninsula rail corridor.  The FRA's waiver decision letter states (with emphasis added) :

JPB additionally explains that the Caltrain 2025 program will temporally separate freight and passenger operations between San Francisco and Santa Clara, CA (Mileposts 0.2 to 44.6).  Temporal separation between these mileposts will be achieved by limiting freight movements to the exclusive freight period hours of midnight - 5 a.m.

That's right, temporal separation means that freight trains will not operate in the same hours as passenger trains, making the need to "clear the mainline more quickly, significantly reducing delays to Caltrain commuter trains and future high-speed rail trains" nothing more than a specious pretext.  Nice play for $3 million, nonetheless!

Temporal separation, by the way, is the best way to avoid the expenditure of millions upon millions of dollars to make Caltrain's positive train control system compatible with Union Pacific freight PTC (and thus, incompatible with the HSR train control system).

Development Oriented Transit, Again

Protecting the peninsula rail corridor right of way from crowding or outright encroachment, whether by private developers or other agencies, has evidently not been a high priority for Caltrain.  Examples abound: a movie theater built right next to the tracks in San Mateo, a "Transit Village" planned right next to the corridor in San Carlos, a Millbrae station that constricts the number of tracks.  All of these examples complicate the task of outfitting the corridor for high-speed rail service, and may add tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of doing so.

Here we go again!

Depot Circle, a large residential/commercial development authorized by Redwood City's recently updated Downtown Precise Plan, threatens to encroach on a vital piece of station real estate in Redwood City.  The city recently released a Request for Qualifications that outlines the project and describes its role as a future focal point for Redwood City's downtown.

Here's the problem: the railroad right of way is only 60 feet wide in this area, but the station is nearly certain to be expanded to four tracks with two island platforms to accommodate the following likely operational scenarios:

• the mid-peninsula high-speed rail stop, since neither Palo Alto nor Mountain View seem likely to welcome a station, and also because Redwood City has the best freeway access of all three corridor locations under consideration;
• Dumbarton commuter service, long planned but unlikely to be left with sufficient track capacity to continue beyond Redwood City under a constrained "blended" Caltrain + HSR plan--thus forcing passengers to transfer at Redwood City, hopefully across a common platform;
• a mid-line overtake location, where Caltrain express trains could exchange passengers with Caltrain local trains, across a common platform.  One of the most promising mid-line overtake scenarios now being considered under Caltrain's corridor capacity analysis assumes that four tracks would be built right through the Redwood City station.

The Depot Circle RFQ asks prospective developers to address the rail corridor issue only tangentially, without offering specific design constraints: "Describe your strategy for dealing with the potential widening of the Caltrain railroad to accommodate High Speed Rail. In particular, explain how far, if at all, would you set the project structures from the current railroad, and any other site design strategies that might be employed to minimize effects of a potential future widening of the railroad."  What are developers supposed to know about railroads?

Here are some specific constraints, which are based on detailed HSR technical requirements and Caltrain engineering standards:

• A four-track elevated station with two island platforms will be at least 125 feet wide (if built as narrow as possible), more than 200 feet wide (if built to the CHSRA's elephantine station design standards), and over a quarter mile long.
• A four-track underground station, however unlikely to be built because of the astronomical price tag, would need even more space to accommodate temporary shoo-fly tracks during construction (30 feet), space outboard of the trench walls for construction equipment movement (15-20 feet each side), as well as clearance for trench wall tie-backs that can't interfere with nearby building foundations.
• Even if the station were moved north or south from its current location, away from Depot Circle, the tracks would still need to spread apart gradually (in conformance with the track alignment standards) and would occupy a wide swath well before and after the station itself.

The upshot of all this: including reasonable building setback clearances, a prospective developer should make an allowance of at least 150 feet for the future expansion of the rail corridor.  A 150-foot corridor is shown overlaid on the Depot Circle parcel map in the graphic at left (see also overlay on original map, 1.1 MB PDF), and takes a significant bite out of the parcels now offered for development--including the project's namesake traffic circle.

If Redwood City wants to become what Palo Alto could have been, it's time for the city, Caltrain, and developers to make the station itself the focus of downtown, provide it with enough land, and build it to be as architecturally striking as the elevated Amsterdam Bijlmer Arena station.  If there isn't enough vision to do that, please just avoid hemming in the rail corridor.

CBOSS vs. Metrolink PTC

UPDATE 8/22 - There are a couple of additional points that require clarification.

(1) It is claimed that Caltrain's CBOSS budget is so high because it is a turn-key system provided entirely by the vendor, whereas Metrolink's PTC is being done partly in-house. But Metrolink's in-house PTC costs are included in the $202 million estimate (see page 7: $77M Metrolink, $90M vendor, $30M contingency). This does not make the comparison any more favorable to Caltrain.

(2) It is claimed that the standards for high-speed rail PTC are immature. Not so; the requirements are found in pages 723 to 825 of the HSR system requirements report (as of August 2010) as well as in HSR technical memoranda TM-3.3.1 ATC System Concept and others in the 3.3.x series. The kicker (as far as Caltrain is concerned) is that those documents clearly state that "the technology must already exist as part of an operating system with proven experience worldwide on at least one high speed passenger railway"... in other words, CBOSS need not apply, and ERTMS (now being installed by sensible commuter rail operators in places like Rio de Janeiro and Auckland) is most welcome.

ORIGINAL POST - The FRA's push to impose positive train control on all U.S. passenger railroads was triggered by the 2008 Chatsworth collision on Metrolink, in which 25 people died and 135 were injured. Not surprisingly, Metrolink's effort to meet the FRA's December 2015 deadline for PTC implementation is in the national spotlight. If a PTC success story was ever needed, it would surely have to be in Los Angeles.

Metrolink is very much like Caltrain, in that it operates diesel-powered double-decker commuter trains that occasionally intermingle with freight trains. Weekday ridership is similar at about 40,000 trips. Being in the same state, Metrolink's regulatory environment is the same as Caltrain's. One struggles to think of "unique local conditions" that might make Caltrain materially different from Metrolink.

According to Metrolink's funding plan for the project, the total budget for Metrolink's PTC system is $202 million, an amount now fully funded. Not to be outdone, Metrolink plans to complete the system a year before the federal deadline.

Here is a summary comparison table of Caltrain and Metrolink.

	Metrolink	Caltrain
System Route Miles	512	77
Fleet Size (Locomotives + Cab Cars)	112	65
Weekday Ridership	~41,000	~41,000
PTC Total Budget	$202 million	$250 million
PTC Planned Completion	end 2014	end 2015
PTC Funding Status	$202M (100%)	<$100M (<40%)
PTC Interoperable with Freight	yes	yes

You might think that for the quarter-billion dollar price tag of CBOSS (Caltrain's PTC project), one would get something extra, like future-proof compatibility with high-speed rail. But alas, no. At a recent Friends of Caltrain meeting, deputy CEO Chuck Harvey confirmed that due to schedule pressure, CBOSS development would forge ahead without any regard to high-speed rail, and that HSR would have to "pay to play," with a possible requirement of "dual fitment," i.e. two separate PTC installations on-board each high-speed train in all of California. Never mind that the statewide HSR fleet would dwarf Caltrain's.

So, if HSR compatibility is not on the agenda, then what makes Caltrain any different than Metrolink? Why is CBOSS going to cost millions more than a PTC system for six times the route length and nearly twice the fleet size, to be delivered a year earlier? Why not realize economies of scale and pattern Caltrain's PTC project after Metrolink's, which has far more stakeholders in a successful outcome?

That is a quarter-billion dollar question.