Happy Birthday, Light Rail!

Sacramento’s starter line opened 20 years ago, and Regional Transit is celebrating by offering free rides all day on Friday, September 14th.

Sure, our light rail system doesn’t get you EVERYWHERE you want to go, but think of it as an actual 20 year old:

– It thinks it can do everything

– It still mooches off others for funding

– It still hasn’t quite decided where it wants to go in life, but definitely has big aspirations

Like many modern 20 year olds, it is also bilingual. “Empuje para abrir las puertas.”

So, get on out there and ride those rails — you never know what you’ll hear!

6 thoughts on “Happy Birthday, Light Rail!”

  3. Several years ago when RT was doing the groundbreaking for the Folsom extension, I was working for Siemens — they’re the company that builds rail (light and heavy) cars down near Florin-Perkins Road.

    Here in Sacramento, they have also built (or are currently building) rail cars for other cities including San Diego, LA, Salt Lake City, Calgary, Houston, San Juan, Boston, Charlotte, Denver, Escondido, Pittsburgh, Portland, St. Louis, Valencia (Venezuela, not Magic Mountain.)

    Plus they can do a full turnkey system, They’ve provided other services like traction electrification, rolling stock (rail cars), or integrated services (retrofits, parts, etc.) for some pretty large transit districts like
    New York City transit.

    While Siemens had supplied the first 36 U2A rail cars in Sacramento’s fleet, it was Construcciones y Auxilar de Ferrocarriles (CAF, of Spain) that won the bid for the next 40 cars for the Folsom and South line extensions.

    For the groundbreaking for these extension lines, one of the PR people RT had hired called me at Siemens to ask for donations of giveaways for the groundbreaking ceremony for the Folsom and South lines — the contract we did not get.

    Me: “You might want to call CAF.”

    PR person: “Oh, I just thought you might want to be involved in the groundbreaking.”

    Me: “We didn’t win the contract.”

    PR person: “If you just have any giveaways with your logo, like little rail cars, or t-shirts or whatever else, that would be great — they’re still looking for sponsors too, but I’m not handling that.”

    Me: “Why would we, the company who is not involved in this project, sponsor it or provide giveaways?”

    PR person: “The groundbreaking is in a couple weeks. Please help us if you can.”

    Me: “Let me call my contact at RT to talk to him about what we can and can’t do.”

    I then called one of my friends at RT, and he was so incredibly embarrassed.

    Pointfinder: The purpose of this comment was to show that many hard-working men and women, other than RT employees, have played a hand in our light rail system in the past 20 years, and there has been some confusion regarding which company has provided which rail cars. The German-engineered cars, while not as pretty as the newer ones, have withstood 20 years and are still running smoothly.

    EVERYONE: Don’t forget! Free rides all day today!

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  4. I didn’t ride the train today, but I rode it every other day this week…free train day is like free museum day, crowded. I did go to the little speech-making ceremony and ate some cake, and talked to some folks at the fair afterward.

    And yes, it isn’t just the city, there are other partners too. I have been to the Siemens plant and they do a lot of stuff there, including refurbishing cars for Amtrak’s California trains. When I was there I think they were refurbishing San Diego’s U2s, which are even older than ours.

    Light rail isn’t intended to go everywhere–it is the spiritual inheritor of what used to be called an interurban. They are intended as connectors to get around in between nearby cities, or around the major corridors of a large city. Getting beyond the major corridors requires a tight connection with other transit modes like streetcars and buses, or strong facilitation with pedestrian and bicycle modes, or, at last resort, park & ride.

    Public transit has to “mooch” for funding: transit pretty much never stands on its own economically, but it provides rewards in return that often pay back the investment. Of course, the amount of public funding that rail-borne transit “mooches” from government sources is a drop in the bucket compared to the monstrous public subsidies provided for air travel and freeways.

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  5. I agree with Runnergirl in her opinion about the German U2A car’s and the Spanish-French CAF car’s.

    The CAF cars stink. They may be more comfortable, but when they malfunction all hell breaks loose. Ever wonder why all the major light rail delays happen on the Folsom line? It’s the CAF light rail vehicles. The Siemens cars may be old, but they never break and when they do it’s as simple as tripping a circuit breaker and thats that.

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  6. Stickie said on 09/14/07 at 2:33 AM (link):
    I love how their 20th Anniversary logo implies that you can take the light rail to the airport.

    shouldn’t they have waited til their 40th anniversary to unveil that design?

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