San Jose state Sen. Dave Cortese has introduced a bill to prevent state agencies selling decommissioned diesel trains for reuse after Caltrain authorized the sale of part of its diesel-powered fleet to Lima, Peru, last month.
Cortese, the chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, introduced the bill on Monday. He critiqued the sale, saying that keeping the trains in use after Caltrain electrified most of its lines would put the same amount of carbon dioxide in the air, just in a different place.
“This is no way to run a railroad by taking the diesel off California’s carbon footprint then putting it right back on in Peru. Are we not all fighting to decarbonize the same air?” Cortese said in a statement. “As a world leader in decarbonization in our transportation sector, we need to lead on this. We need to be serious about decarbonization worldwide.”
California has set tough targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but the state still has a lot of work to do to reach them. Many transportation options – including both public transit and privately-owned vehicles — emit carbon dioxide due to the combustion of petroleum-based products, like gasoline and diesel fuel, in internal combustion engines.
If selling the fleet for reuse wasn’t an option, Caltrain public information officer Dan Lieberman said, the organization still would have tried to sell the vehicles, but without a waiver, they would be decommissioned and considered less valuable. And if they couldn’t find someone who wanted a non-working locomotive, the vehicles would have likely been sold as scrap.
Sam Sargent, director of strategy and policy for Caltrain, defended the sale, saying that Lima, Peru, was the only party interested in the entirety of the fleet, and it was an “open question” if the city would have taken the passenger cars alone if they didn’t get a waiver to put the diesel-powered locomotives back to use.
“We’re really proud of the fact that these were able to be sold in working order, because a lot of 40-year-old locomotives would just go straight to the scrap pile, so the waiver let us sell this to a country that doesn’t have a commuter rail operation, had some pretty significant air quality issues and serious congestion issues in the corridors that Lima, Peru, is developing,” Sargent said.
Sargent said that studies done by the Department of State and its commercial attaché found that the implementation of a rail service would remove 20,000 metric tons of pollution from the air and take 4,000 cars off the road and provide between 150,000 and 250,000 passenger trips each weekday.
“As a rail agency, I don’t think it’s going to surprise anyone when we say we’re in favor of train service,” Lieberman said. “We’re generally of the opinion that any policy that results in more people getting out of cars and into sustainable modes of transit, like trains, is a good policy and one worth pursuing, and that’s generally where we’re at.”
Lieberman also pointed to social media chatter in Peru of people saying they were excited about the trains and were thankful to have an option that would get them out of traffic.
“The trains that we’re currently talking about shipping down to Peru, they helped to build Silicon Valley.” Lieberman said. “We’re really eager to see what these trains are going to build in the near future for Lima, Peru.”