I’ve been written up
Mike Rosenberg, a reporter of the San Mateo County Times/Bay Area News Group, wrote a nice piece about the service that available at the Mercury News and Inside Bay Area. It should also appear in tomorrow’s edition of the Palo Alto Daily News.
I also have a large (15-20) batch of keys I need to generate and mail out so if you requested one it should be sent out shortly.
July 29th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
i’m famous!!! :-p thanks for the great service ravi!
July 30th, 2009 at 7:33 am
I saw the article and the TV spot last night.
You probably have a whole bunch of new folks on the list now
Side note: was happy to see fearless leader” was using a Hackintosh.
July 31st, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I wonder, would it be useful to anyone else to add updates on which equipment a train is using? In my ideal worlds, I would only ride the bullet with the new (Bombardier) cars – I will happily wait for the next train if I know it has the new cars. But as far as I can tell, there is no way to predict which equipment any particular train will be using – other than riders at SF/SJ tweeting about it.
Oh, and thank you very much!
August 3rd, 2009 at 6:50 pm
+1 on valerie’s request. Though, as much as I’d like to see that, that shouldn’t go on the regular @caltrain Twitter — it would totally crowd it up.
It should be a separate account. Though, it seems like there’s a somewhat predictable pattern to whether they have new or old cars…can someone sanity check that?
August 4th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
The @bikecar tweets have this information – the different car types have different bike capacities.
August 9th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Caltrain’s daily expectation of which trainset (consist) will run which service is disrupted every single day, according to more than one of their operations folks. They have not posted the information about their daily consists, because they can not be as accurate as they want to be (again, according to their operations folks). That excel spreadsheet which matches a locomotive to the train run would be a decent way to predict, but again they prepare it early in the day, and they have admitted several times their IT infrastructure is lacking. One morning within the past calendar year (likely March) their server for the signal equipment went out and prevented regular train service for 3 hours, during the morning commute.
Granted, the baby bullet service has a higher propensity for Bombardier equipment, but they have only 5 Bombardier consists, which prevents all Baby Bullet service schedules to have the Bombardier.
Caltrain has even had offers for free assistance to offer real time updates (ala BART, ACE, MUNI, and many other transit organizations); they have declined all comers.