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In a perfect world, there are lots of tracks and lots of trains. But in the real world, you can't always build what you want. So Caltrain did the next best thing.
"Step aside! I'm coming through!"
If trains could talk, this would be the catch phrase bellowed by the Baby Bullets: a fleet of new rush-hour express trains whizzing every weekday between San Francisco and San Jose. The Bullets' 47.5-mile trajectory has been a busy passenger corridor for 140 years, but in the past two years the right-of-way, the operation, and the rationale for service have been completely rethought and redesigned by owner and operator Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board, better known as Caltrain.
The Baby Bullets - the first ones were fired June 7, 2004 make five round-trips on weekdays, lopping over a half-hour from the route's 90-minute average running time. The trains look flashy, too: Caltrain acquired three bright red-and-white, five-car trainsets from Bombardier, powered by burly MP36 locomotives.
Other commuters routinely ride express trains all over the country without a second thought, but you could sense that riding a Baby Bullet is a big deal for people who once suffered through stop after stop. There's a certain smugness on board when a southbound Bullet screams past a local pulling away from Bayshore or a limited-stop train gliding into Lawrence.
And the express trains are running this race with only about 10 additional miles of track on what was once a simple, two-way railroad.
Southern Pacifies 1904 doubletracking of the Coasl Line between San Francisco and San Jose created enough capacity to easily accommodate a handful of streamliners such as the Daylight and Lark to Los Angeles and the Del Monte to Pacific Grove, a smattering of freights calling at Bayshore Yard, and an armada of inbound (northward) and outbound commute trains. (By convention, SP and Caltrain omit the "r" in "commuter" when referring to the Bay Area suburban service.)
San Francisco departures were timed so that earlier trains bypassed the close-in stations, which were served by trains following a few minutes behind - a time-tested, skip-stop scenario that helps maximize track capacity. In 1959, 15 commute trains and the two-stop Del Monte departed SPs grandiose terminal between 4 and 7...