A representative from one of the Bay Area transit providers has been providing updates to the service for some time now.  You may have noticed them as the ones full of information such as

NB227 and NB230 delayed. NB STOPPED: 233@Lawrence-255 near Bayshore- 231@SM – 135@SJD

No NB trains operating at this time. SB134, 332 and 230 op as locals & reduced speeds.

VTA is accepting all Caltrain fare media on their El Camino Real bus routes.

SamTrans will accept all Caltrain fare media on all buses for the remainder of the service day

As a gesture of apology, all rides on Caltrain will be free until 1:30 a.m., Dec. 5.

Moving forward authoritative or official tweets of this nature will be prefixed with O: to indicate this.  The Thanksgiving break got in the way of rolling this out earlier.

In other news another contributor noted the train numbers encode the type and direction of service.  1xx is for local, 2xx for limited, and 3xx is for baby bullet.  Even routes are for southbound and odd are for northbound trains.  I will update the Guide to reflect this and and will be removing and NB and/or SB labels from updates to reduce tweet sizes.

Also a few notes and reminders about the service to remember:  First, the @caltrain and @bikecar accounts are not monitored so to speak.  I currently do not review any @replies so don’t be offended for the lack of interactivity if you ask questions or try to send updates via this method and are ignored.  Second, the service is not operated by any transit authority and the majority of the updates are provided by commuters.  And finally, I have been keeping hands off approach with the updates and only have had to guide a few contributors so far.  I suspect many of the followers have enabled SMS updates (I have) so please consider the newsworthiness of your update.    With that in mind please try to omit editorializing or including irrelevant content.

And finally I strolled to 4th and King this morning gambling that service would have been restored after the signal system failure.  I ended up being interviewed by KTVU since I was just working on a bench while I waited for the next MUNI to stop by to take me home.  They actually put my ugly mug on the 5 o’clock news and used my sound bite as the lead to the story.  I plugged this service off camera too.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 1:12 am and is filed under @caltrain, Announcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.