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Rodents gnawing through a cable caused the downtown Mountain View railroad crossing gates to get stuck in the down position early Wednesday morning, leading to hours of flashing lights, clanging bells and traffic backups.
Mountain View police notified Caltrain of the issue at around 1 a.m., after Waymo reported that one of its autonomous cars was stuck at the Castro Street rail crossing, city spokesperson Brian Babcock told the Voice.
According to Caltrain spokesperson Dan Lieberman, crews got to the train crossing and started work at approximately 1:30 a.m., completing repairs by 8 a.m. The city learned that Caltrain was on scene at about 7:30 a.m., Babcock said.
Workers identified a damaged ethernet cable that had been chewed by rodents and replaced it, Lieberman said. The wiring is associated with the crossing mechanism, he added.
“This kind of incident is quite rare,” Lieberman said via text, adding that Caltrain officials are working on “an engineering solution” to address similar issues in the future.
During the incident, cars heading north on Castro Street were stopped at the railroad crossing. However, Lieberman confirmed that no cars were stuck on the tracks and that Caltrain’s schedule was not affected.
Southbound vehicles are already blocked from crossing the downtown Caltrain tracks, a restriction that the city put in place during the pandemic.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include that repair crews arrived on scene at around 1:30 a.m., which a Caltrain spokesperson confirmed after the article was initially published.
Wow, I don’t usually criticize the stories here, because it’s local journalism, and I’m happy to have it. Two questions immediately jump out at me:
1) Why did it take Caltrain 6-1/2 hours to send someone to fix an obvious problem?
2) When the gates are down, southbound traffic on Moffett doesn’t get a turn, leading to bicyclists and pedestrians dangerously crossing Central Expressway against the light. Why didn’t the City send someone out to do proper traffic control?
Caltrain was there at 1:30. The city didn’t find out until much later.
I’m guessing “an engineering solution” means “run the cable in a pipe”.
I think I was there around 8:30 am and they were still working on it. I saw a woman on a scooter almost get hit by a car going south on Central Expressway when she crossed against the red light.