Photo: Caltrain
If you ride on the newest commuter trains from San Francisco to San Jose, the first thing that you might notice is how quiet they are: Instead of the rumble of a diesel engine, the trains now run on 100% electricity.
By switching to electric trains, Caltrain, the rail service, can eliminate 250,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions a year, roughly as much as the pollution from 55,000 cars. But it’s also just a better experience for riders. That might convince more commuters to stop driving to work, cutting emissions even further.
Electric trains are faster
First, the electric trains run faster than the diesel trains that they’re replacing. Instead of a single locomotive in the front pulling the entire train behind it, each individual car is now an “electrical multiple unit,” or EMU, with its own engine, connected to overhead electric wires. “It’s generating power throughout the system,” says Dan Lieberman, a public information officer for Caltrain. “It just allows it to get up to speed much faster”.
Because the train can start and stop faster, Caltrain can add more stops to its express trains, and still shave minutes off the route. The new express route between San Jose and San Francisco will stop at 11 stations instead of seven, and take 59 minutes instead of an hour and five minutes. (The local train will take 75 minutes rather than 100 minutes.) During peak commute hours, more stations will now have trains every 15 to 20 minutes, even though Caltrain won’t use any additional trains. At off-peak hours, trains will run every 30 minutes, rather than every hour. (Caltrain started rolling out the new trains last week; they’ll be fully in service by the end of September).
Less pollution
While waiting on the platform, riders will no longer breathe in clouds of diesel exhaust when the trains approach. Even inside a train, diesel can be bad for your health. One Danish study that gave riders air quality monitors found that they were exposed to 35 times more ultrafine particle pollution and eight times more nitrogen oxide on diesel trains than on electric.
Neighborhoods near the train tracks will also be exposed to much less air pollution. Diesel exhaust is linked to asthma, cancer and other diseases, and premature death.
For climate pollution, riding a diesel train is still better than driving a gas car. But freight and passenger trains still emit around 35 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year. Right now, only a tiny fraction of American trains are electric. Caltrain is now running the only electric heavy rail in California; it was the first service to convert from diesel to electric in the West. (A handful of other passenger trains in the country run on electricity, including an Amtrak line in the Northeast.
The project was a major undertaking. Overhead wires were added along 51 miles of track, which is also planned for later use as part of California’s high-speed rail. (For a separate train service that runs from San Jose south to the town of Gilroy, Caltrain is now working on switching to battery-electric trains; it doesn’t own that stretch of track, so overhead wires can’t be used.) The full $2.4 billion project, built with state and federal funding, took seven years. It’s arguably something that should be happening everywhere—and other countries, like India, are moving much faster toward electrification.
An unexpected benefit
Because the trains are now quieter both onboard and in adjacent neighborhoods, it also might mean that more people are willing to live near the tracks. “I think they’re going to enable more development around the stations,” Steve Heminger, who represents San Francisco on the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board that operates Caltrain, told the San Francisco Chronicle. New apartment buildings are already being added near the stations, and that could accelerate even more—and the residents who move in might also be more likely to take the train to work instead of driving.
Fonte Fast Company
