April 7, 2008
Caltrain Fatality This Morning
Some of you may remember a couple of weeks ago, when we were on a Caltrain that struck and killed a woman near 22nd street. Well, we were on the train again this morning, and when we got on at mountain view, a very familiar voice came over the PA.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we're sorry," said the voice. "But there has been a fatality involving a train ahead at Menlo Park, and we will be holding here for a little while."
This time we weren't directly involved in the accident, but the conductor from Easter Sunday - the guy who handled himself incredibly well in a stressful situation - was running our train this morning. He was more relaxed, but still somber. After a delay of around thirty minutes, we moved forward, and rode slowly through Menlo Park. From our seat on the west side of the train, we saw the body - two legs, covered in a yellow plastic sheet. It was very quiet on the bike car as we rode past.
Caltrain got up and running quite quickly afterwards, and we pulled into San Francisco about thirty-five minutes late. All trains are 20-30 minutes behind schedule, so if you're headed to the Giants season opener, you might want to leave early.
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On the train this morning. We stopped about 3 blocks north of Menlo Park. No one freaked out and everyone stayed calm - I think no one was in a hurry to get to work on a Monday.
We waited for 1 hour and then another southbound train pulled up alongside us and the put a bridge between the trains and everyone walked across. Ended up 1.5 hours late.
Caltrain staff were very professional.
We need a forum or chat room to keep up to date about this type of info. Caltrain is not very forthcoming about publicizing delays. They really should be sending commuter alerts, etc. Why don't the electronic signboards have realtime schedule information like on Muni?
There is an imeem forum although it is not really used now:
http://groups.imeem.com/VRpM3CcA/forums/R-2wgx3S/
If you call the Caltrain operator they'll give you all the information you need to know.
SFist Dan, were you on the #231 NB? I was the guy with the Specialized who bailed out and rode to work (to Palo Alto) this morning.
The conductor's name is Randy. He was training a newbie this morning, also. The new guy made the initial announcement and then Randy came on.
To TrainGuy: There's a Twitter page you can follow for these kinds of updates.
http://twitter.com/caltrain
Cyclelicious - yep, that was me, and I absolutely remember who you are. The newbie was the conductor from two weeks ago...the other guy (with the Boston accent and Red Sox tie) I've had before. Wow.