The primary obstacle for level-boarding for Caltrain at present is federal and state regulations that apply to passenger rail systems that share tracks with freight.
- It's common practice for freight train personnel to ride hanging from a ladder on the side of the very slow-moving trains when maneuvering the trains into position to switch tracks or hook cars together. The Federal Railroad Administration and also the California Public Utilities Commission have regulations on dimensions of station platforms to prevent a crew member from being killed by being knocked off the side of a train while it passes through a station. This places restrictions the ability of transit agencies to configure station platforms to provide "level-boarding".
- The Federal Railroad Administration also requires increased "buffer strength" of passenger trains that share tracks with freight trains, so that if a passenger train should happen to collide with a freight train, damage to the passenger train and loss of life would be minimized. As a result, most passenger trains in the U.S. are built like heavy, bulky, and fuel-inefficient SUV's compared to their svelte and swift European and Asian counterparts. The FRA regulations governing passenger trains standards where they share tracks with freight, makes building and operating a train that shares tracks with freight more costly. In addition, trying to make a SUV-like train run like a speedy racing car is difficult, if not impossible. That's one reason why the Acela "high-speed" trains in the Northeast have been such costly, problem-plagued machines that hardly emulate the high-speed experience abroad -- in short, a disaster. But there are ways to ensure rail safety without imposing such onerous design requirements, and some are working to change the federal regulations. <Learn more>