Capitol Corridor Success Story: Part 2

The UP partnership

For about five years after the line’s launch in the early 1990s, Capitol Corridor trains made few runs and attracted few riders. By 1997, California discussed either killing or cutting the service, which offered just four daily round trips between Sacramento and the Bay Area.

That’s when communities served by the line stepped in, launching the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA)—comprised of six transportation agencies across eight counties—to manage it. Convinced that it was key to the corridor’s vitality, they wanted to not only save the line but increase service on it. In August 1999, they hired Gene Skoropowski to get it done.

Skoropowski’s experience included stints on the staff of transit systems in Boston and Philadelphia and nearly two decades as a consultant with the engineering firm Fluor. His first order of business was to build a better relationship with Union Pacific, which owns the tracks. The trick was to give UP a reason to view the Capitol Corridor as an equal partner rather than just an interloper on its tracks.

“My job but was to figure out what was important to the Union Pacific that would make them want to be a real business partner in this deal,” Skoropowski said. Not surprisingly, money turned out to be an excellent motivator. “People say railroad are in the business of running trains. No, they’re not in the business of running trains. They’re in the business of making money. Running trains is simply how they do it.”

The CCJPA created a contract with UP (separate from Amtrak’s agreement) to incentivize higher on-time rates. Bonuses kicked in when Capitol Corridor trains achieved an on-time rate of 92%, and they increased when the trains achieved a 96% on-time rate. (Amtrak paid a lower bonus, and it paid out only if the average on-time rate for all lines on a carrier’s tracks reached 85%.)

“You can imagine what happened,” Skoropowski said. “All of a sudden, on-time performance never really went below 92%. In many months, it was over 96%. Because it was an opportunity for the railroad to make money.”

Notably, though, this process took time to play out and pay off. The Capitol Corridor’s on-time performance rate was in the mid-80s through most of the early-to-mid 2000s. It was 93% in 2009 and 2010, 95% in 2011, and 94% in 2012.

More is More

But just running just a few trains reliably wouldn’t have transformed the Capitol Corridor. To become a real alternative to driving, the trains needed to run much more frequently.

The tipping point came with the seventh run, around 2000. Going from six to seven daily round trips in the corridor spiked overall ridership by about 40%. (Adjustments to the schedule that made it more convenient for commuters living east of Sacramento were also key.) “That told me we had crossed the threshold, to where it was becoming real transportation,” Skoropowski said.

The surging ridership created a virtuous cycle of growth—more riders led to more revenue, which funded more and better service. A state legislator from the Sacramento area knew how important the line was to locals and helped secure $1.5 million in funding for two additional round trips, the eighth and ninth, around 2001. From there, the frequency and value of Corridor trains steadily grew. By 2004, there were 12 round trips. By 2006, there were 16. Meanwhile, annual ridership also kept growing. By 2008, it was about 1.7 million people, with 60% of riders using the train for work/business and 36% using it for persona/leisure purposes. About one-fourth of riders accessed the train via transit, and 23% drove to the station.

Running so many trains reliably would have been impossible without the collaborative relationship with UP. One early result of the partnership was that UP and CCJPA signed two master agreements—one for planning/design and one for construction/maintenance. The process took about 18 months, but when it was complete, CCJPA could move forward on upgrades with just a one-page amendment. Streamlining the process cut costs and made the CCJPA more nimble and efficient.

“We avoided what the state had traditionally done, which was negotiate every investment project individually,” Skoropowski said. “We got all of [the lawyerly details] done in the master agreement. It was the major thing that allowed the construction projects to happen, and for me to get the money out of the state in the allocation process.”

Pulling together

Another upshot of the collaborative relationship with UP—and the bonuses for stellar on-time rates—was that the freight railroad had good reasons to help Capitol Corridor trains run as smoothly as possible.

CCJPA and UP officials met quarterly, and fixes for congestion points often emerged from those meetings. For example, one double-track drawbridge was a particularly nettlesome congestion point. A consultant suggested a third track to open it up. But at one of the quarterly meetings, a Union Pacific dispatcher pointed out that there was a simpler and cheaper solution.

“He said no, all you need to do is put in a universal crossover over here that gives us the ability to shift the trains from one track to the other,” Skoropowski said. “Well, we put in that crossover and low and behold—fluid operation.”

Another example: Heavy freight trains caused the line’s conventional “frogs”—mechanisms that allow trains to cross from one track to another—to wear down rapidly, creating delays. “You would have to go to a 10 mile an hour speed limit,” Skoropowski said, “and the welders would come out for days and weld everything back” to standards.

At the suggestion of a UP maintenance expert, CCPJA began using its capital budget to invest in more durable “movable point” frogs, and UP used its operating budget to install them. “We started doing that and all of the slow orders—because of the frogs wearing down—went away,” Skoropowski said.

That’s the paradigm that transformed the Capitol Corridor into one of America’s best rail lines in a few years: More trains running more reliably, with the CCJPA and UP working together to make the system steadily better. Because both sides had incentives to identify and implement creative solutions, the time and energy that might have been wasted defending turf was channeled into a good working relationship.