Daly City bound train. More about the BART fleet at: www.BARTchives... More about BART A2 cars at: bartcars.weebl... More about BART B2 cars at: bartcars.weebl... More about BART C1 cars at: bartcars.weebl...
So we are down to 8 cars... of which, only 3 will keep their trucksets. What do we think the last movement under their own power will be? Has this movement already occured? It is sad... I do not think the western railroad museum will be able to power their cars (lights and HVAC) and everyone else plan to gut their traincars... I suspect a similar situation where all legacy accessories are removed. I cannot fathom why BART was so desperate to scrap them all to quickly... and send their aluminum overseas... the metal could have been held back for special projects... perhaps special builds of iPhones or soda cans with BART metal. There must have been a market for this beyond feight to asia... Was it really that expensive to keep a few trainsets around for historical purposes? How hard is it to build an unpowered siding and allow them to rot for a few decades. Railroads do this all the time strictly for speculation on future scrap value. BARTs actions in the 2020s will not age well...
It is quite likely they have already rolled under their power for the last time. WRM plans on having lighting on in the cars, alongside some portions of the cars restored to their original appearance and even quite possibly a sound system. There is far more on the works - where WRM parks the cars and builds a display may be the foremost BART museum. BART scrapped them at an overall reasonable pace - 5 years for 660, while in the past 5 years they’ve received about an equivalent number of new cars. Yard space was at a premium during 2020. BART did not scrap the cars themselves, but decommissioned and sent them to the scrapyard. Where the metal ends up is a scrapyard matter. BART did not keep cars since they had a limited chance of running them - running them requires maintenance and space, of which both divert away resources from the current revenue fleet. Not much of anything on the legacy fleet was directly compatible with the new cars. But, BART has assisted WRM in preserving the cars, so not everything was lost.
