Peninsula Commute

Passenger rail service between San Francisco and San Jose

The Peninsula Commute, also known as the Southern Pacific Peninsula or just Peninsula, was the common name for commuter rail service between San Jose, California and San Francisco, California on the San Francisco Peninsula. This service ran as a private, for profit enterprise beginning in 1863. Due to operating losses, the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) petitioned to discontinue the service in 1977. Subsidies were provided through the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) in 1980 to continue service, and it was renamed Caltrain.

Since 1863 the San Francisco Peninsula, the series of towns (and later, cities) between San Francisco and San Jose, has been served by a railroad. The San Francisco and San Jose Railroad first provided freight and passenger service, followed by its successor, the Southern Pacific, and then briefly by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and finally by a regional Joint Powers Board which runs today's passenger trains.

Although a line had been proposed in the past, construction on the railroad between San Francisco and San Jose was started in 1860 "by a group of local capitalists of more than ordinary energy and resources" under the auspices of the San Francisco and San Jose Rail Road (SF&SJ), and completed in 1863. The Central Pacific Railroad transferred its rights for the construction of the right of way between San Jose and Sacramento to the Western Pacific Railroad (WPRR, which was founded by the same members that had founded the SF&SJ) in late 1862. In December 1865, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company (SP) was incorporated to build a rail line between San Francisco and San Diego.

Under Southern Pacific the line was double tracked in 1904, and multiple cutoffs were built over a period ending in 1910. which veered to the west around San Bruno Mountain. The Bayshore Cutoff also eliminated the use of helper engines to bring trains over the mountain. The second, the Mayfield Cutoff, opened in 1908 to provide service to western Santa Clara Valley cities such as Los Altos and Los Gatos. The third, the Dumbarton Cutoff, opened in 1910 and included the first bridge across San Francisco Bay, between Newark and Menlo Park, saving many miles to Oakland and Sacramento compared to the prior route through San Jose and Santa Clara. The Peninsula Electric Railroad was incorporated around the same time the Dumbarton Cutoff project was launched, and it was suspected that it was controlled by Southern Pacific in preparation for a quad track expansion, as it was laying a route parallel with the Southern Pacific. As envisioned in 1909 from plans for the Peninsula Electric, SP announced that it would investigate the electrification of its Peninsula Commute line in September 1921, promising better and more frequent service. Just a few days later, SP cited excessive post war inflation, taxation, and competition from publicly funded highways as factors making electrification neither "practicable or desirable". Similarly, plans to eliminate all at grade crossings were announced in 1909, but not carried to completion. As Southern Pacific's franchise to operate on 4th Street in San Jose was ending, it elected to build a diversion track to the west. This line forced a move for the city's passenger traffic to a new station at Cahill, placing it one mile from downtown (whereas it had previously been a four block distance). SP's Peninsula Commute experienced record ridership during World War II. During the war, 26 trains ran between San Jose and San Francisco per day, with headways as low as 5 minutes (traveling north) in the mornings and 3 minutes (traveling south) in the evenings. After the war, a May 1946 railroad strike displaced approximately 10,000 train passengers onto highways, causing "historic" traffic jams along the Bayshore Highway, with commute times for some automobile drivers to balloon from 30 minutes to 75 minutes going from Burlingame to San Francisco, a distance of approximately 19 mile (31 km). In 1954, surveys comparing traffic on Bayshore Highway with train traffic concluded that just over half of all commuters to San Francisco passing through Brisbane were taking the train, and that eight more lanes would need to be added to the freeway to accommodate traffic if rail service were to stop suddenly. However, in the period after the war, Peninsula roads were improved; the four lane undivided Bayshore Highway (completed in 1925) was rebuilt into a six lane divided freeway between 1949 and 1962, and Interstate 280 was completed in the 1970s. Train ridership declined with the rise of automobile use, falling from a peak of 9.2 million annual boardings in 1954 (approximately 16,000 weekday riders) to 4.4 million in 1977 (approximately 7,000 weekday riders). During peak hours, Peninsula Commute trains operated with headways as low as three or four minutes; however, with skip stop and express train service patterns, the minimum wait for riders at a given station would be ten minutes. compared to 12,000 daily passengers in 1967 In 1971, when Amtrak took over long distance passenger operations, Southern Pacific's extended commute train to Monterey, California, the "Del Monte", was discontinued. Some SP passenger locomotives were sold to Amtrak and the remainder were transferred to Peninsula Commute service, which continued to operate. In 1975, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) published the Feasibility of Upgrading Peninsula Passenger Rail Service (PERSUS) report. PERSUS concluded the Peninsula Commute was underutilized and proposed a minor upgrade to improve service (and ridership), or major upgrades to extend service to downtown San Francisco, either by connecting with BART in , or by extending the SP terminus to the Transbay Terminal; the ultimate goal was to remodel the service to be closer to transit than commuter rail, which entailed a reduction in headways so that passengers would have to wait less than fifteen minutes between trains during weekday daylight hours. which prompted SP to petition the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for a fare increase of 111 percent in August 1974, as fares had increased minimally and ridership, approximately 12,000 passengers per day in 1967 remained flat, despite the fuel crisis. The CPUC authorized a 25% increase in fares in a 3–2 vote on July 12, 1977, effective August 1977. On May 6, 1977, SP formally filed a petition with the CPUC (Application No. 57289) to discontinue the commuter operation due to ongoing losses. At that time, SP was running 44 trains a day. The petition was opposed by regional transit agencies, including the MTC, who passed Resolution No. 479 to request the CPUC deny the SP petition. Since the CPUC had not taken action on the petition 120 days after the filing, SP filed another petition to discontinue service with the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) on November 17, 1977. AB 1853 also allowed the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to negotiate with SP for operation of the commuter rail service and the purchase of the right of way between Daly City and San Bruno, which had only seen occasional freight traffic since the completion of the Bayshore Cutoff in 1907. were used to draft AB 1853. PENTAP recommended that train and bus service be improved, fixed rail transit facilities be better utilized in the near future, and facilities and options should be preserved for long range expansion and modernization. and offered $8 million to help purchase buses to replace the service. However, both samTrans and the Santa Clara County Transit District stated they would not be able to operate that bus service; it was estimated that a fleet of 122 buses would be required, arriving and departing from San Francisco every 35 to 50 seconds. Testifying later at that same hearing, samTrans chair John Mauro pointed out that since the inception of the San Mateo County bus service in 1975, service to San Francisco was deliberately crippled in speed to avoid competing with the rail service. Mauro had previously tried to negotiate with SP to enter a "purchase of service" contract in March 1976, but SP refused to accept a direct subsidy, which led to the passenger fare subsidy instead. Ridership increased during 1979 and 1980, aided by the gasoline crisis and fare subsidies; SP's ICC petition received a preliminary affirmative ruling from the administrative law judge in July 1979. In the first fiscal year, covering 1980–81, operating costs were $19.33 million and fare revenue was $7.81 million, resulting in a farebox recovery ratio of 43%. The deficit was covered by a mix of Urban Mass Transportation Act funds ($2 million), contributions from SP ($400,000), and the state and three counties served ($4.56 million each). By 1988, the service was the only operating commuter rail in California. The state felt that regional control of the Peninsula Commute was more appropriate, as it was primarily a benefit to the region, not the state. Thusly the Peninsula Corridor right of way was purchased for from SP in 1991 by the newly formed Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board (PCJPB), who subsequently assumed responsibility for the operation of Caltrain in 1992. The PCJB then contracted operations to Amtrak, ending 122 years of operation by Southern Pacific. TransitAmerica Services took over operations in 2012.