San Bruno B.A.R.T.

  It's been a deadly year along the Caltrain corridor. Perhaps that should come as no surprise.

  A Mercury News analysis shows that more than 70 trespassers on Caltrain's tracks have been killed over the past decade -- the second-deadliest rate among 13 major commuter rail lines nationwide.

  And despite some new safety efforts, the toll will likely not improve dramatically in the future.

  One of the main problems? Not enough money for big-ticket projects like those that have held one Southern California rail system's trespasser death rate to less than half Caltrain's.

  The newspaper analyzed the federal data after reporting last month that Caltrain -- which uses 77 miles of track from San Francisco to Gilroy -- was on pace for its deadliest year since 1992, when the agency started logging fatalities.

  So far this year, seven have died: three by suicide and four by accident.

  Suicides, however, aren't included in the federal tally of trespasser deaths, which cover incidents like trying to cross tracks on foot or driving around lowered crossing gates.

  ``People are careless,'' said Arthur Lloyd, a former Amtrak employee and a member of the board that oversees Caltrain. ``They don't follow the old adage that you stop, look and listen.''

  But Lloyd and others acknowledge more can be done to save people from their own mistakes, carelessness or recklessness -- especially young people.

  Take the case of Jacqueline Gamboa, the 18-year-old who was the first to die on Caltrain's tracks this year.

  It was dark just before 7 p.m. on Jan. 23, when Nathan Schrock -- Gamboa's boyfriend of four years -- made an irredeemable mistake while driving home to Gilroy.

  Police say Schrock, now 21, saw a freight train at a standstill, but the safety arm across the tracks was down. He assumed the barrier was malfunctioning. It wasn't. As he drove around a car and a truck waiting in front of him and looked left at the stopped cargo train, a Caltrain liner was coming, out of view, from his right. His 1995 GMC Sonoma pickup was nearly cut in half.

  Gamboa's mother, Marla, said she feels for Schrock, who is recovering from serious injuries.

  But, she added: ``I would like for Caltrain to take some accountability, for not only my daughter but the others as well.''

  Such accountability, she said, would include making the rails safer. She wants to see crossing arms that run all across a railroad intersection, not just the right-hand lane on each side.

  She also wants the trains -- which can legally cruise at up to 79 mph -- to travel more slowly inside cities, closer to the limits put on cars. And she wants to see fences topped with razor wire along the tracks to keep kids from taking dangerous shortcuts.

  Caltrain has erected fencing in spots, but officials say it's too expensive for the entire route and is often cut or jumped. And Caltrain representative Jonah Weinberg said fault also lies with people making bewilderingly bad decisions: ``I can't tell you why someone would ignore a lowered, ringing, flashing barrier arm going across the road,'' he said.

  Still, some of the reforms proposed by Gamboa -- and others -- have worked elsewhere. And one not tried by Caltrain has worked especially well for Metrolink, the Southern California commuter rail that cuts through Los Angeles and several neighboring counties.

  From 1996 to 2005, Metrolink logged 2.85 trespassing deaths per million train miles traveled. That's worse than the overall average of 1.46 deaths on the 13 rail lines analyzed but much better than Caltrain's average of 7.05 deaths over the same period.

  The Mercury News analysis included only those heavy-rail commuter lines that are overseen by the Federal Railroad Administration and that logged more than 1 million train miles during the past decade.

  A key to Metrolink's lower death rate, said spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell, is tough, aggressive enforcement. For example, she said, an officer often rides with the engineer and watches for trespassers near the tracks or a driver running a crossing. The officer then radios a colleague on the ground to track down the offender.

  ``If we catch you trespassing, we're going to bust you,'' she said. ``You could possibly be arrested.'' Citations are $300 a pop.

  In addition, engineers call in when they see kids playing near the tracks -- and police respond. All of this gets a lot of news media play in Southern California, she said, including from TV crews that sometimes ride in the locomotive, cameras running.

  Caltrain's Lloyd said this month, his district will follow suit, at least in part. Plans are afoot to start putting cops on the ground and in the cab -- and the public won't know when or where.

  Metrolink also appears to have been more aggressive than Caltrain in installing pedestrian crossings, and it's building so-called ``Z crossings,'' a zig-zag path that forces pedestrians to look both ways, up and down the track, before traversing it.

  Beyond such protections, Southern California has an already-built safety edge of more than 220 grade separations -- where cars and trains don't cross on the same level, but above or below the other.

  Caltrain has only about a dozen grade separations -- such as could have spared Gamboa's life. Lloyd said he can sum up much of the problem with ``five letters: M-O-N-E-Y.'' They cost millions of dollars to build.

  If passed by voters in November, a state bond measure will offer $300 million for such separations, an amount Lloyd calls promising but ``a drop in the bucket.''

  Lloyd agrees with the Gamboas that car-rail intersections should have safety arms that run across both lanes. And he is pledging to talk to every city about how to use sales-tax money to possibly help pay for them. ``I'm going to go after it,'' he said Friday.

  And while Metrolink stresses education along with enforcement -- and Caltrain last week pledged to step up its own classroom efforts -- Lloyd said some schools near tracks have balked at such offers.

  ``To be very frank,'' he said, ``we have run into resistance in the schools. They don't want to take the time to take the kids out of the class to do stuff like this.''

  As bad as Caltrain's rate is for trespass deaths, it's not as bad as the San Diego Northern Railway, which grabs the ignominious honor of most such deaths in the nation per million train miles traveled.

  Pete Aaland, the agency's director of communications, offered no concrete explanation, but a few potential reasons. The tracks run only blocks from the heavily populated coastline, which tempts shortcuts to the beach. The weather's nice and people are outdoors a lot, and train traffic has stepped up by about two-thirds since 1992, when the transit agency purchased the railroad.

  Most important, the agency knows its problem and wants to fix it -- through education, enforcement and engineering, which is the most costly of what train-safety experts call the three E's.

  San Diego plans to build a handful of pedestrian over-crossings, and perhaps a grade separation or two will come. But, as Lloyd said, they cost a lot. The last one, built in Solana Beach about seven or eight years ago, cost $18.5 million.

  ``Everybody in railroad would like the trains on a different plane than pedestrians or cars,'' Aaland said, ``but it's a difficult one to finance.''

  Warren Flatau, a representative for the Federal Railroad Administration, agreed that money for safety is often scarce. But he also encourages railroads and the state agencies that oversee them to address safety ``on a corridor level,'' picking the most efficient spots overall to build such things as elevated crosswalks or automated gates that block sidewalks when trains are crossing.

  But ``it's hard,' Flatau acknowledged. ``Always, there's limited resources.''

E-mail Dan Reed at dreed@mercurynews.com