The Peninsula Commute, also known as the Southern Pacific Peninsula or just Peninsula, was the common name for commuter rail service between San Jose and San Francisco 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 Caltrans in 1980 to continue service, and it was renamed Caltrain in 1985.
History 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 Caltrans and finally by a regional Joint Powers Board which runs today's passenger trains.
San Francisco–San Jose Railroad
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 Railroad (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. By the end of 1868, it was revealed the Big Four of the Central Pacific consisting of Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker had a controlling interest in the SF&SJ and SP, and the SF&SJ, SP, the Santa Clara and Pajaro Valley Railroad, and the California Southern were folded into a consolidated Southern Pacific Railroad on October 12, 1870.
Under Southern Pacific
Under Southern Pacific the line was double tracked in 1904, and multiple cutoffs were built over a period ending in 1910. The first of these, the Bayshore Cutoff, opened in 1907 and rerouted the line through a series of five tunnels built along the shoreline of the San Francisco Bay Area. This saved approximately three miles and seventeen minutes compared to the prior route, 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 the San Francisco Bay Area, 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). Passenger service along the Ocean View Branch ended after November 1928.
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 . 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). Service to Los Gatos ended in 1959; the railroad noted the ease of reaching Vasona, the new end of the line, via automobile. The Mayfield Branch saw its last service in 1964, with its right of way reused in construction of the Foothill Expressway.
During peak hours in 1975, 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. During off-peak hours that same year, service frequencies dropped to longer than two hours between trains.
On several occasions during the 1960s and 1970s, SP attempted to discontinue the commute service due to increasing deficits and stagnant ridership. Ridership was 11,500 daily passengers on 22 trains in 1970, compared to 12,000 daily passengers in 1967 and 10,000 daily passengers in 1946. The sole daily commute train which utilized the Mayfield Cutoff between Palo Alto and Vasona was discontinued in 1964 with the construction of the Foothill Expressway. In 1971, when Amtrak took over long distance passenger operations, Southern Pacific's extended commute train to Monterey, 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 Daly City, 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.
However, by that time the Peninsula Commute was no longer profitable: operating deficits were rising, from in 1964 to over by 1968, by 1975, and just one year later in 1976 according to an independent review, 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:"round trip fare from San Francisco to San Jose was in 1948, only in 1967" 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. Because the CPUC decision process was so slow, SP President Benjamin Biaggini offered to purchase 1,000 eight-passenger vans and donate them for vanpools in exchange for permanently discontinuing the Peninsula Commute service.
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. On October 17, 1977, the administrative law judge issued an order asking "Who will pay the cost of this regional insurance against the uncertainties of tomorrow? In the interim period, CALTRANS, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the three counties involved are directed to meet, consult, and plan toward whether they will be willing to obtain funds under the provisions of the Urban Mass Transportation Act and their own resources to meet the operating deficit of Southern Pacific's commute and transit operations."Beckett, John in
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. Although the CPUC denied the SP application on April 19, 1978, jurisdiction had already passed to ICC.
State administration and Caltrain
In response to the CPUC petition, Assemblymember Lou Papan wrote Assembly Bill 1853, which allowed local transit districts served by the Peninsula Commute to purchase tickets from SP at face value and sell them to riders at a discount, subsidizing passengers. AB 1853 also allowed 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. Preservation of rail service was seen as critical to ensuring traffic would continue to flow, as both the Bayshore Freeway and I-280 were nearing capacity; and to preserve air quality in the region. The right-of-way between Daly City and San Bruno was seen as key to a planned extension of BART to San Francisco International Airport, an extension that eventually opened in 2003.
The recommendations of the 1977 Peninsula Transit Alternatives Project (PENTAP) Report (mandated by the Legislature in 1975 by SB 283) were used to draft AB 1853.Beckett, John in 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. MTC passed Resolution No. 411 in 1977, proposing a three-phased approach: Maintain existing service levels, by subsidizing passenger fares and improving the SP interface with MUNI Improve service levels and standards, by entering into a "purchase of service" contract with a rail operator (SP) and defining service based on regional transit requirements, not operator needs or profits Expand rail service