As much as a representative or two of such a "pioneering" system deserves preservation, this is a difficult prospect for anyone save for a static exhibit--the BART system is broad-gauge (5' 6").

Any interest? WRM Rio Vista is an obvious possibility, and San Francisco itself has a transit museum dedicated to PCCs and cable cars......

Now BART is retiring the last survivors of its original fleet--yes, 59 cars introduced in 1972 are still in service--and going public with discussions about their fates.

To operate a car at BART it must receive regular maintenance and inspections. It does not seem likely that BART would want to retain an inventory of necessary parts and train and certify mechanics and electronic technicians to maintain a fleet of 3 cars, which is the minimum allowable train lingth. Also each A car has a complete set of automatic train control equipment worth, I would estimate, over $100,000. This equipment would be transferred to the new cars or used to maintain the C car fleet. It seems unlikely that any A and B cars will be retained by BART for operation on the system.

Could they be regauged? Are the A cars the ones with the beveled ends? Can you hook two A's back to back? They'd look quite funny with trolley poles giving rides through the Illinois soybean fields.

Yes. After the PCC, all evolution in public transit stopped dead. Then there was 40 years of nothin'. And then BOOM, there was a rail renaissance. BART was on the lead, and BART was full of daring innovations (and mistakes), and no doubt of it -- BART is the most historically important of ALL OF THEM.

But this is a major, constitutional crisis for railway museums, and especially transit museums. Most are all about preserving pre-1950 transit, and being about the nostalgia, and about early 20th century engineering which was so stout and godly. Unspoken was the shared expectation that they were preserving an era that was gone for good. Most have spent their entire existence (many since WWII) being just that, and that's how everyone thinks.

So now there's this NEWKRAP.

It's a much sharper distinction than steam vs. diesel... And you know all the hand-wringing museums had over THAT.

See the pickle? As a museum full of pre-1940 cars... do we preserve TRANSIT? Or do we preserve early 20th century transit specifically? Will other museums preserve this newkrap? (not likely.)

Does our museum stick with early 20th century railroading, and slowly watch our relevance as a museum diminish, as no one still lives who remembers anything in our collection? Or do we slowly come around to the notion of saving newkrap, too late to preserve the first generation, then spend the next 200 years explaining why these key developments are missing from our collection?

For instance WRM is a museum that is basically complete. It's all indoors. We're in the phase of replacing carbarns now. Our mission is to preserve electric railroading in the west, but our master planning is completely unprepared for the onslaught of BART, Sacramento, San Jose, Sandy Eggo, L.A.'s variety of lines, Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake, Phoenix... to say nothing of San Francisco, and we can't refuse them!!! This is all LARGE equipment which ran M.U. so we can't do it justice without two each. We don't have the barn space, and the approved master-plan has nowhere to put the barns if we wanted to. So you're talking about, essentially, a whole 'nother Lone Mountain retreat intensive to reestablish who the heck WRM is; new site approval, practically reboot the museum.


Let's see...

The oddball track gage is a very special problem, because the BART "air bag suspension" truck design is entirely unique to BART... and one other system. The Washington Metro Gen-1 Rohr cars, the infamous crashy ones. And yes, they are standard gage. DC can't get rid of those things fast enough, so as a practical concern, preserving BART actually starts Right Now in Washington.

The voltage is the least of my concerns. Actually the prototype BART substation is at BAERA, and powers operation daily. That's about the only thing from the BART prototype era that got preserved. The American Aerotrain is better preserved.

The carbody construction isn't so bizarre that you couldn't work with it. Mostly, it's flimsy. Those cars were intended to be extremely light.

I don't believe the composite wheels exist anymore, however, the axles are hollow.

If only we were preserving 40-year-old "high tech" gear. That stuff is manageable. All the original BART cars have been refitted with more modern controls. Some got AC drive, which will make truck swaps real interesting. The signature "Bizzzzzzzzzz" of pulling out of a station -- gone. The old warbling "Bwauuummmm" of the doors abut to close - fixed. The old brown seats and carpet - blue now. (somebody read "Dress for success".) It all went in a dumpster in Sacramento in the 1990s and nobody thought to preserve it, because nobody conceived of preserving a BART train, let alone rolling one back technically to 1968.

High level loading is standard on third rail systems. The real problem is that BART cars are really wide, so existing high-level stations like at IRM won't do.

Preserving the minidresses: You know, it was (approximately) the Summer of Love.