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Triple Treat

Triple Treat

If you’re a 1) transit nerd, 2) bike geek, and 3) frugal, you won’t find a better souvenir of the Bay Area than a free Caltrain bike destination tag. These plastic freebies are used for grouping bikes by destination in the bike car and available from the conductors onboard the train.

I only hope nobody tries to steal my tag back here in NYC.

(Wythe St, Brooklyn)

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Caltrain 382

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpchan/5788612811/

On a southbound Caltrain “baby bullet” from San Francisco, our train hit someone south of Palo Alto. The air brakes tripped and the train stopped between stations. We were told our train wouldn’t be moving and that another train would be coming to pick us up.

We couldn’t see any sign of the accident from the windows. One of the regular riders next to me (“I work in mental health,” she noted) said that there’s a suicide on the tracks about once a month. The passengers seemed generally nonchalant about it. The bike car, where I was, was rather chatty.

After about ninety minutes, a train pulled up alongside ours on the adjacent track. The passengers stepped out of our train to the trackbed and stepped onto the other. Us cyclists boarded the new train last with our bikes. The Caltrain staff were very courteous.

I got this shot of our stuck train as we pulled away in the rescue train. I didn’t look for any sign of the accident on the locomotive and you won’t see it in this photo either. We made all stops on the way back to San Jose.

RIP the person who died on the tracks today.

(Somewhere near Mountain View, CA)

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So Civilized

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpchan/5786912689/

Biking and transit are perfect partners. The Bay Area is so lucky that the folks at CalTrain not only understand this but also have the resources to do something about it.

(CalTrain Bike Car, San Jose, CA)