RAIL PASSENGER ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA 1017 L Street PMB 217, Sacramento, CA 95814 www.railpac.org 5th December, 2009 Mr. Joseph H. Boardman President and Chief Executive Officer NATIONAL RAILROAD PASSENGER CORPORATION 60 Massachusetts Avenue NE Washington DC 20002 Dear Mr. Boardman: Once again I must write to you about the catastrophic service failures on the Pacific…
RAIL PASSENGER ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA 1017 L Street PMB 217 Sacramento, CA 958114-3805 www.railpac.org 1st December, 2009 Hon. Art Brown, Chairman, LOSSAN Corridor JPB And members of the Board Dear Chairman Brown: Once again the travel plans of hundreds, possibly thousands of Amtrak passengers were severely disrupted by a locomotive failure on the LOSSAN corridor,…
Report by Noel T. Braymer Train 571 left San Diego on time at 10:35 A.M. from San Diego on Saturday October 24, 2009. But by the time the train got to San Clemente around 11:40 the brakes locked up on the Business Class Car bringing the train to a halt. This was just the start…
Editorial By Noel T. Braymer What rail passengers want is very simple. They want trains that are clean, comfortable, safe and convenient. Convenient means trains that run on time at times people want to travel and arrive at times they want to get to were they are going. Convenient means stations that are easy to…
Reported by Mike Barnbaum, RailPAC Associate Director, Sacramento. NOTE: See a RailPAC photo report on Gene Skoropowski’s Capitol Corridor career on this site. (NOTE: Thanks to BART/CCJPB for the photo of David Kutrosky) The 74th meeting of the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority began with a report of Chair Jim Holmes who referred to Gene…
Commentary by Paul Dyson I have previously quoted New Zealand scientist Ernest Rutherford, “We had no money so we had to think”, and this struck a chord with a lot of readers. Regardless of the field of human endeavor to which you might apply this aphorism it is a good starting point. Try to do…
January 23, 1999 Report by Steve Grande of Trainweb Today the Rail Passenger Association of California (RailPAC) held its 19th annual meeting/luncheon at the Old Spaghetti Factory Restaurant here in Fullerton, next to the Amtrak station. Speaking to the capacity crowd first was Michael McGinley, Director of Engineering & Construction for Metrolink. Then John Barna,…
Picture report by Russ Jackson Photos by the writer unless otherwise indicated. The rail advocacy community was disappointed to learn that Gene Skoropowski would be retiring from parent organization BART and his position as Managing Director of the Capitol Corridor JPB the end of November, 2009, and that he would be leaving the Golden state…
Reported by Eugene K. Skoropowski, Managing Director, Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority October 2009 ridership numbers across the nation are beginning to show a ‘closing of the gap’. During this first month of the new fiscal year, the Capitol Corridor ridership was down significantly compared to October 2008, but again, still higher than October 2007.…
Comments and PHOTOS By Russ Jackson, website editor Round trip from Ft. Worth to Oklahoma City on the Heartland Flyer September 30 and October 2, 2009. The Ft. Worth, Texas Intermodal station is a busy place, what with Amtrak’s Texas Eagles and Heartland Flyer, the TRE commuter line between Ft. Worth and Dallas, and it’s…