Rose Garden Resident
News
Photograph by Vicki Thompson
Work Center: Work on Caltrain's new train maintenance and operation center is nearing completion. Routine maintenance, including daily inspections of locomotives and passenger cars, will be done in the enclosed facility.
New train center nearing completion
By Mary Gottschalk
Caltrain's behemoth of a maintenance center along the three railroad tracks behind San Jose MarketCenter is nearing completion.
Officially called the Centralized Equipment Maintenance and Operations Facility, it's CEMOF to Caltrain and the people working on the three-story red, gray and white building.
Work on the $139 million project started on July 5, 2005, and completion is expected in early summer, says Joe Siino, project manager and resident engineer.
Once in operation, CEMOF will house both Caltrain's maintenance and operations functions.
Control and dispatching of all trains will be handled here, a task much like that performed by airport controllers.
Additionally, routine maintenance, including daily inspections of locomotives and passenger cars, will be done at CEMOF.
Caltrain currently maintains 29 locomotives and 110 passenger cars, operating 96 trains a day.
Two 5 1/2-foot-deep pits will allow workers to stand under trains while inspecting them. Currently, they have to crawl underneath trains parked on the tracks, usually in San Francisco, Gilroy or at the Tamian station.
A third, deeper pit is under the drop table--a mechanism that supports the train body while lowering wheels when they need replacing.
At the top of the building are skylights, which double as smoke dampers. If smoke accumulates inside the building, they will be opened to draw it out. At other times, the sunlight coming through will augment the electric lights.
Adjacent to one end of the building is a 70,000-gallon tank for diesel fuel, allowing for onsite train refueling.
Currently, tanker trucks must drive to the trains and refuel them.
Outside the main CEMOF building is a smaller, 400-foot-long cinder block structure that will house the train washer.
At present, Siino says trains are washed by hand and on an irregular basis.
The washer will allow frequent, mechanized cleaning, taking about 25 minutes for a train to pass through at 3 to 5 miles per hour.
Each wash will use 350 gallons of water, with 80 percent of it recycled. A water treatment plant on site will cleanse the other 20 percent along with any industrial waste.
To minimize noise CEMOF might generate during its round-the-clock operation, Caltrain has erected a sound wall along the Stockton Avenue side of the 22-acre site.
Another noise minimizer will be the installation of ground power, so train interiors can be cleaned and lights operated without the locomotive running. Currently, the locomotive must be fired up before maintenance workers can clean.
As construction continues, between 100 and 150 workers are on site each day.
When CEMOF is complete and in full operation, it will have about 200 employees, working in three shifts, 365 days a year.
Employees will park off Autumn Street, walking through a 210-foot tunnel under the tracks to reach the CEMOF building.
