Well not really, but I will be going on holiday 8/21 through 9/12 and will probably be punched in the face when I acclimate back to PST.  While I will be checking email I won’t be adding new requests for keys.  This shouldn’t be too much of a problem as I typically batch them once or twice a month.

In other news while getting on SB236 I noticed a new sign (left) at the end of the cab car noting how many bike cars were in that train configuration.  Am I slow on the uptake or is this brand spankin’ new?  I didn’t see a similar sign on the engine but didn’t look very hard.  Assuming this is actually updated regularly it should be trivial for someone at a terminal to note the configurations early in the morning and do a mass update.

Hmm, and while reading through the tweet history I found this Aug 11 tweet noting the new signs.  I guess I have been in the dark.

Finally a few people have asked me if posting guidelines have changed.  No they have not.  What do I mean?

Please remember:

- Leave the editorial comments to your own feed

- Please use OLD and NEW notation when referring to gallery and bombardier respectively.  Not everyone knows the difference and it will just eat up on the maximum character limit you have.  Fellow contributors have asked that people follow this to no avail.  I am now asking everyone.  Please do this do I don’t have to do message pre-processing.

- Please omit the class of service (e.g. bullet, limited, local).  As noted by a contributor this is encoded in the train number.  The first digit represents the class where 3 is bullet, 2 is limited, and 1 is local.

- Timestamps at the end of each tweet are inserted by me.  There is no need to manually add it as it will eat into your max tweet length and cause confusion for others.

- Please keep the tweet to the account it belongs in.  Car configurations belong in @bikecar

- Only update when there is something to say.  A train that is on time or even <5 minutes behind schedule is not news.

As always I want to thank everyone for contributing and helping out.  Remember this will only be successful if people play by the rules.  I don’t have many at all so please stick with them.  If you have concerns about them or anything I’ve said please do not hesitate to contact me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 5:58 pm and is filed under @bikecar, @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.