Food is Your Fare Day

On Dec. 8 UTA hosted a Food is Your Fare day on the new FrontRunner South line. From 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., the public was invited to donate canned food and ride for free between Provo and Salt Lake City. More than 32,000 people rode the train that day and 25,324 pounds (12.5 tons) of food were donated to Community Action Services Food Bank in Utah County and the Utah Food Bank in Salt Lake County. Even with freezing temperatures and snow people came out in droves to ride the new train.

Passenger Service Started Dec. 10

The line opened for regular passenger service on Monday, Dec. 10 to both cheers and some jeers. More than 6,700 people rode the train but the first day was not without it’s hiccups. Many early morning trips ended up behind schedule and we are working on improving the reliability of trip times.

Tuesday, Dec. 11 started the day with a locomotive breaking down in Kaysville. The subsequent work-arounds caused delays throughout the system during the morning commute. Trains will occasionally break down, but it was especially unfortunate timing on the second day of FrontRunner South service. UTA asks for patience as we work to resolve these problems. The first days of a new service always come with unanticipated challenges and a few surprises. We apologize to those whose commutes have been disrupted by this service change.

Meeting the Schedule

There are a number of issues that have kept many of our trains from operating according to schedule:

• Our schedule was based on four years of running FrontRunner to Ogden, the route south is proving to have operating challenges we haven’t faced before and we’re finding it harder to recover from delays than the line north.
• Larger passenger loads at Orem, Murray, Salt Lake Central and North Temple are creating longer than scheduled dwell times at stations.
• The addition of a fourth car on some trains, while helping meet our capacity needs, have slightly slowed down our ability to accelerate and decelerate.

To start addressing all of the issues above we are currently analyzing all of the elements of our trips to better identify efficiencies and issues that may be keeping us from making schedule. We are also working with our operations staff and train hosts to better facilitate boarding and disembarking.

It is our responsibility to get this issues fixed as quickly as we can so that we can give our passengers a reliable schedule, this may mean making adjustments to the schedule or altering our operations in other ways. We are committed to making Front Runner successful and an integral part of the Wasatch Front’s transportation network.

One thing we would ask our passengers to help us with is to quickly board and exit the trains. When the train is nearing your stop please gather your things and make your way to the doors so you are ready to get off. Also please make sure you are on the platform ready to board when the train arrives, it speeds up boarding if you are spread out on the platform rather than all boarding at just a few of the train doors.

Thank you for your patience while we work through these issues, and thank you for riding.

Wifi Issues

Many people have noticed the wifi on FrontRunner is not always available. We have been faced with both capacity issues and hardware issues on some trains. We have worked quickly to increase the capacity of the system but still have some cars on which we have not yet been able to replace wifi hardware due the the limited time the trains spend in the yard. We are working with our wifi vendors as quickly as we can to resolve these issues.