This week we’re joined once again by Sam Sargent of Valley Transit Authority for Part II of a conversation about transit agencies and special projects and programs. Sargent chats with us about Austin’s light rail plans, Caltrain electrification and moving diesels to Peru, and gives some thoughts on what real visionary transit leadership looks like.
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Jeff Wood: I want to hear more about what happened to the diesel units from Caltrain, which I saw in this YouTube video. Why did the, why did the trains go to Peru?
Sam Sargent: So when you’re doing a wholesale swap out, essentially, of your fleet on a commuter railroad — such as an agency taking 400 diesel buses and overnight going to 400 battery electric — you’d have to figure out something to do with those 400 diesel buses.
So that was the conundrum that Caltrain was looking at towards the end of the electrification program. We were beginning to receive these beautiful Stadler electric train sets from Salt Lake City. Pretty quickly, we had a space problem on our hands. Caltrain is 53 miles of electrified corridor between San Jose and downtown San Francisco.
It’s a finite size. There’s a finite number of sidings. The maintenance shop in San Jose is only so large and so pretty quickly, you know, it was not going to be a situation where you could just keep the entire diesel fleet sitting there while you had the whole electric fleet on site and then operating. The flip of the switch, literally in September of last year, was just that: one evening, people were riding a diesel train to San Jose and the next morning they were riding an electric train up to San Francisco.
And so we knew that we needed to part with 93 gallery cars — the silver cars that people who’ve been to the Bay Area would’ve seen before — and 20 diesel locomotives that were, you know, not at the fancier end of the clean diesel spectrum, but had served the railroad very reliably for a long time.
We wanted to do this with minimal consultant help. I wanted to have a project that had a pretty lean budget and hopefully brought some revenue in the door, did some market sounding around the country.
We had some interest at first from Southern California because they were going to need to increase their fleet at least temporarily for the Olympics. And we had some interest from a couple of other properties around the country that had different reasons, including midlife overhauls of their diesel equipment. But those leads didn’t turn into anything.
Then we got an email seemingly out of the blue from a company in Pittsburgh that was serving as a broker for the government of Lima, Peru, the mayor in particular, who was looking to start greater Lima’s first commuter rail line.
We’re willing to try anything because I would much rather have these vehicles be ridden on than have them crushed into a cube or turned into an artificial reef We started talking and this wound up being about a year-and-a-half-long process.
We started having direct conversations with the mayor of Lima, and they wanted the entire fleet. And you know, as somebody who’s in the transit business, it’s rare that you could part with that much equipment that quickly.
It seemed like a great deal to us. We were able to price them at a level that was good for both the government of Lima, and would generate some revenue for Caltrain. We had a couple of regulatory hurdles that added to the complexity, because ordinarily these diesels would’ve needed to have had a hole punched in the engine block and they couldn’t have been used again.
We were able to get a waiver after a professor at Berkeley helped us with research proving that Lima would get an emissions reduction because our diesel equipment was going to be taking heavy polluting vehicles and buses off the roads down there.
It wound up being 90 gallery cars and 19 locomotives. In the end, the question became how do we move these things down to Lima, Peru?
Wood: It’s not like there’s a train track that goes down there.
Sargent: Unfortunately, there’s not, so it was going to have to go by ship. That wound up being very fascinating because there are a finite number of roll-on, roll-off ships for rail equipment. We also looked at a couple of other permutations of how to move these things, many of them very labor intensive, like removing the trucks — the wheels — from underneath the cars.
But there was a specialized company out of Houston that was able to bring a ship over from the Netherlands to the Port of Stockton, which has a deep water canal up to Stockton. Everything was loaded onto two ships, and had about a two-and-a-half-week journey down to Lima.
And there’s some great video on YouTube. A couple of great drone operators got out to Stockton and got some great shots of both the loading process, watching it go through the North Bay, heading towards the Golden Gate, and then eventually a lot of very excited folks down in Lima who got shots of it being unloaded.
I was happy that these extremely well maintained vehicles — considering that they were 40 years old — are going to be used to move people again and to take people off the road and hopefully to inspire a new generation of transit customers down there.
