PITTSBURG, Calif. — Bombardier Transportation announced Friday it would open a new railcar assembly plant in Pittsburg, with new Bay Area Rapid Transit cars to be the first equipment built at the site.
Assembly of equipment for the 775-car order is currently taking place at Bombardier’s plant in upstate New York, but will be transferred to the California site.
“We are pleased that the new rail cars for Bay Area passengers will now be produced in the Bay Area by Bay Area citizens,” said Elliott G. Sander, Bombardier’s president, Americas Division, in a press release. “The Pittsburg site will also enable Bombardier to pursue additional business opportunities in the growing rail transit equipment market on the West Coast and to serve this market with increased effectiveness.”
The San Jose Mercury News reports that Bombardier will lease more than 122,000 square feet of a 200,000-square-foot warehouse from Hitachi for the assembly plant in the in the East Bay community. About 50 people will work at the plant when it opens in September, with that number eventually expanding to about 115. The move will free up space at Bombardier’s Plattsburg, N.Y., plant for orders from East Coast customers.
As of Friday, 84 of the new BART cars have been delivered, with 75 in service.
All I can say is BART is horrible system. Slow, noisy, dirty. It has never lived up to its potential, IMO.
Mister Wildman:
Good morning, Sir. What you call the BART “bastard gauge” is the Indian gauge, first used by the British because it was felt that it would better withstand cyclones and other severe storms. Why the designers of the initial BART system felt that such weather phenomena must be designed against in the Bay Area is a complete mystery to me.
At this point it is locked in. The loading gauge for the BART stock is built around this track gauge, all the platforms are designed for that particular loading gauge, and changing things to standard gauge would not be as simple as moving one rail over. I don’t have the specifications for the BART cars, but I do believe they are wider than anything moving on the national rail system.
In my opinion BART is an exercise in how to do things in the most expensive way possible. It is a necessary transit system, do not mistake my meaning, but this choice of track gauge, which has driven the entire design, has caused all equipment for that system to be a custom design and build. There are no economies of scale in this, no chance of a standardized design such as which resulted in the PCC car.
Final assembly almost has to occur next to the right-of-way. Once assembled the cars cannot be transported on the standard gauge network, which would mean that if assembled elsewhere they would have to be trucked to the system. And given the size of the cars and their mass that would be expensive.
If this system were standard gauge the rolling stock could be assembled elsewhere and brought by rail to the system. But that is not possible.
Aside from mass inhalation of herbal products once unlawful to possess but now lawful to possess, I can think of few technical reasons for the specification of Indian gauge for this system. One reason for doing so (from a legal perspective) is to remove it from the jurisdiction of the FRA – if it is not compatible with and does not interchange with the national rail system an argument could be made that it is not a railroad. But I have no insight as to whether this was the reason, and I have no insight as to what the designers were thinking – or not thinking.
It is a mystery.
The above comments are generic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Find your own damn lawyer.
BART operates in an area prone to earthquakes and perhaps the wider track gauge was meant to make the trains more stable. In any case, the cars are noticably wider inside which adds to the rider ambiance.
As for PCC streetcars, they were far from standardized. The PCC car is defined more by the trucks than the body above them. Most of the patents were on the trucks, which are quite different from the usual trolley car (or locomotive) design. The bodies come in two easily recognized styles: without and with standee windows. However, the bodies varied in length and width from one transit system to the next and track widths varied from 42 inches (Los Angeles Railways) to 64 1/2 inches (Baltimore) with various sizes in-between. This link describes many of the PCC car variations.
https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/The_PCC_Car_-_Not_So_Standard
Herb has it mostly correct, forgetting that they also touted a higher speed with the wider gauge. As for the newest extension, it’s not really and extension and it is already running, it’s a feeder service that uses off the shelf DMU’s from Antioch to the Pittsburg/Bay Point station at which you transfer to a regular BART train.
MIKE FRIEDMAN – As far as I know transit cars (subways. trolleys) are never moved over freight railroads on their own wheels. I don’t know if it’s the buffer strength, the type of couplers and air brakes, the overall delicacy, the need to protect against vandalism, or some combination of all of the above.
The original BART enabling protocols were a political, economic and engineering camel(a horse designed by a committee). Part of the specs were that all (or almost all) rolling stock be made in California. The winning bidder was Rohr Aircraft Corporation of Chula Vista (just below San Diego.), a company that had zero expertise in rail transit. The guage rationale was “for greater stability and a smoother ride” according to press releases of the time. Not only did the beast have to be built in California, it had to be designed here to–with all the bells and whistles the pols could come up with. The gold-plating and log-rolling were embedded from the start, the price of Gov. Brown’s acquiesence to the demands of the powerful House majority leader whose name escapes me. (Jesse Unruh) . The low profile and broad 66″ guage were also said to reduce the cost of tunneling under the Bay to Oakland. Some would suggest this rationale was a thinly clad devise to exclude companies such as Budd or Pullman-Standard from being involved. Everyone involved studiously looked away from the Bay Bridge whose lower deck had housed Key system streetcars until shutdown in 1958. Before it abandoned service to SF, Sacramento Northern ran a few heavy-weight interurbans into the Ferry building terminal via the bridge (1940). Why BART couldn’t use the bridge (which after Key’s departure wass paved over) mystified a lot of people. The rationale offered the public was that increased vehicular traffic needed the lanes, ergo the tunnel and the time and not insignificant cost to build it.
Is a picture emerging here? Public works as cash cow? Utility to the public incidental to narrowly parochial interests? The good part is that five short years after the Key system folded, BART was approved by the voters in 1963. A lot of people became incensed over escalating costs and delay, delay, delay until the thing finally opened in 1972. If memory serves, a special sales tax was enacted to help fund the project. While BART was abuilding, Espee commuter service was awithering. It held on by a thread from San Jose to SF but disappeared in the East Bay. So much for priorities. That’s how the thing developed, as I recall from my perch as a student, first in San Diego and later in Fresno. I’m sure some will assail my memory dependent narrative. Now comes word that BART’s newest extension will be 56-1/2″ Go figure..
Anna and Charles,
I grew up the Bay Area when the original BART test track (Walnut Creek to their Concord yards) and later when rest of the original 72 mile sysyem was built. My father used to take my brothers and I out along right-of-way as it was under construction. Our family’s slide collection contains 100’s of pictures of BART under construction.
Portions of BART’s Fremont line were built parallel to the WP and portions of its Richmond line were built along side Santa Fe’s now abandoned right-of-way. The test track was built on the recently abandoned Sacramento Northern R/W. When BART was proposed, the railroads – probably the SP – did not ever want BART on their tracks (remember they operated one of BART ‘s predecessors), and so either they lobbyed hard to keep it off, and/or the politicians appeased them by selecting a wide gauge. Since I was in grades K-6 when BART was built this is second hand information
John Blaubach
Mister Landey:
You’re the esteemed engineer. I’m just a dumb housewife and I should not be forgetting my place.
The above comments are generic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Find your own damn lawyer.
Anna, much of what you write is speculation. Here’s my guess: the designers thought (wisely or otherwise) that the wider gauge would lead to a smoother ride.
They need to Start Making Superliners 3 Car order for Amtrak.
Ms. Harding hit the nail on the head. It would be fascinating to know the actual per centage of domestic content. In view of Bombardier’s record of production problems in Canada, people had better hold their collective breath pending a successful track record. Considering the size of the order, I would have thought it would make sense to hold replacement of the existing cars until enough new stock had been accumulated to reguage the system. The bastard guage was someone’s bad dream back in ’63 and creates a host of avoidable expense–essentially a proprietary vehicle. It’s another example of gold-plating that thoughtfjul members of the public find so infuriating.. The cost of rail-based mass transit would be far less if virtually every order wasn’t custom designed. I would a PCC-like standard design,mor group of designs
With all its ups and downs it’s good to see Bombardier still soldiering on in the difficult biz of railcars.
Non-rail oriented news sites read the press release and conclude ‘Now the new railcars won’t have to be trucked across the country.’ Of course the shells are still being fabricated in Quebec.
And where does the revenue go?
It’s nice that Bombardier is doing a final assembly plant in the US, but where did design take place and how much of the content comes from North America?
It would be nice to see the Bombardier plant in central Vermont reopened. That plant finished a lot of Amtrak and transit and subway cars over the years…
BART goes thru Pittsburg.
Also, moving the cars by rail isn’t really feasible because they’d have to be put on flatcars anyway due to BART’s wide gauge.
Thunder Bay is still building cars for the Montreal Metro. That order isn’t complete.
Then what will they do at Thunder Bay?
Wouldn’t it be nice if UP would try to get the business of moving the cars from Pittsburg to Hayward.