Brian's Brain

Continued from 'Telecommuting And Public Transit: Personal Insights And Troubling Stories'...

Somehow, we made it through Saturday with only a few delays and unusual incidents. On Sunday morning, train crews reported a potentially suicidal individual along the tracks in Hayward, slowing service on the San Jose end, but not shutting down the railroad. Police were called to investigate. The rest of Sunday was uneventful.

Then it started again Monday, July 21. The first two trains operating between Oakland and Sacramento (#518 from Oakland and #521 from Sacramento) encountered an errant vehicle driven onto the tracks- not at a crossing- and blocking both main tracks. Train traffic was stopped, delaying hundreds of folks. Only after a tow truck removed the vehicle and Union Pacific inspected the tracks to be sure no damage was done, could trains resume their journey. 

At approximately 9:55 am, Train #533 reported a passenger who apparently boarded the train at Martinez without a ticket. Upon arrival at Richmond Station (the next stop), he removed the emergency window seals from a designated "Emergency Escape" window on the upper level of the train, kicked out the glass and jumped out the window nearly two stories to the ground below. The passenger left behind a suspicious package having exposed wiring. Passengers were immediately evacuated, the train ‘tied-down’ and an emergency was reported. The Walnut Creek Police Department Bomb Squad was notified, and all BART service to/from Richmond was also shut down shortly thereafter. Ultimately, the entire process consumed five hours- from evacuating trains, station closures, the Bomb Squad inspection, hosing down of the train interior and exterior with high pressure water hoses, removal of the suspicious device, inspection of the train, removal of the train, and finally to the resumption of service on both Capitol Corridor and BART.

I am relating these events to you so that you might better understand the safety precautions taken by Amtrak, BART, the City of Richmond and Union Pacific for your protection. The delay was extensive, and the impact was felt by tens of thousands of Capitol Corridor and BART train riders all through the late morning and into the mid-afternoon. Meanwhile, Amtrak staff were brought on-site and were making alternate travel arrangements, talking with local bus companies and BART to assist in moving passengers to their destinations. Every attempt was made to get both train crews and trains to locations in preparation for the afternoon travel period with as little afternoon disruption and delay as possible.

From calls to my office, I know some of you did not receive timely or accurate information. It was not for want of trying. I monitored the Amtrak emergency conference call that was in effect throughout the incident, and am well aware of the yeoman efforts of the Amtrak rail and bus staff, the cooperation of BART and Union Pacific, and 'rescue buses' provided by Amtrak private carriers and our local transit agencies, particularly the County Connection buses at Martinez Station.

The cascading effects of the illegal and inconsiderate actions of just one individual disrupted the entire day for thousands of travelers, and for this I apologize to all of you who were impacted by it. Some days, no matter what seems to go right operationally, an external incident throws cold water on all those efforts. Every day, there are hundreds of folks working on the trains, dispatching trains, providing information to the riders, supervising tracks and signals, working at stations, etc. These folks regularly go above and beyond their minimum duty requirements to make your trip reliable and uneventful. Unfortunately, in spite of all that effort, an incident like the one on Monday just unravels all those efforts.

We know that communication could have been better in some areas, and we are working on that. However, I want you to know that every person who could be engaged to help was on the job. Many folks worked hard and long to get everyone to their destinations and to get service back on schedule as quickly as possible after the tracks were released.

I commend all those who worked and helped in this recovery effort, and I apologize to all the riders who were caught in the middle of this unplanned and unnecessary incident, caused by one person who apparently had little regard for their own actions or the impacts of those actions on anyone else. 

We do our best to deliver you a quality train service that you can rely on. Sometimes, no matter what we do to make improved service a reality, a single individual finds a way to undermine those efforts.

We will pick up the pieces, regroup, and resume our efforts to deliver you reliable train service, minus a couple of damaged (and badly needed) rail coaches with seats in them. Again, I apologize to all of you impacted by any of these events. 

A dreadful story, but a classy response, I thought. And, of course, such calamities are also possible on automobile-filled freeways; on a train, at least, you can nap, read, work on your laptop, visit the snack car (or bathroom), etc until the mess clears up and you're rolling again. In the hundreds (if not thousands) of times I've traveled on Amtrak these past ~13 years with EDN, I've only encountered three situations where my arrival was substantially delayed. Once, on the East Coast, was due to a vehicle that (unsuccessfully) attempted to outrace an oncoming train at a crossing ahead of us. And twice, both times when I was on the Amtrak Capitol Corridor, the train hit a passerby who somehow wandered onto the tracks at the wrong time. Check out this video clip for a visual explanation of how such a thing could happen (language may be NSFW, and thanks to Boing Boing for the heads-up):

In closing, I'll pass along Ron Wilson's insightful feedback after I forwarded Skoropowski's memo on to him. Food for thought:

An excellent job of damage control. He sounds sincerely hurt by all this. It reminds me of a comment I heard many years ago: that the infrastructure of an industrial society can only function with the consent of all the people. As we get more technologically complex, it takes fewer and fewer people to cause a major disruption. Today, an informed nut could deny electricity to most of California for hours or days. A real mad scientist could probably shut down the Hetch Hetchy water system semi-permanently. One psychotic episode can, obviously, stop mass transit in an entire corridor for most of a day. We will eventually reach the point where one clever individual can literally destroy a city. I think there are only two ways a technological society can function in the long term: either by caring for every one of its citizens, or by becoming a police state and enslaving every one of them.