BART's birthday
Started: 2022-10-12 20:40:46
Submitted: 2022-10-12 22:14:18
Visibility: World-readable
It's a BART party! A big BART party!
In September, BART celebrated its 50th birthday with a party at the plaza above Lake Merritt Station in Oakland. This seemed like an obvious excuse to go to Oakland to celebrate my favorite transit system. Julian got an invitation to a human classmate's birthday so I let the kids stay at home rather than dragging them along with me.
To get to Oakland I drove to BART's newest station, Berryessa/North San Jose, which had the misfortune of opening in 2020. This is the current extent of the East Bay trunk line, until the next phase of the Silicon Valley expansion opens in a decade or so, once BART and VTA can figure out how to build it. (I visited the previous end of the East Bay trunk line, Warm Springs/South Fremont, in 2018; all I did then was step outside the station then turn around and come back.) This new station has a large surface parking lot (managed by VTA), befitting its location in the suburban outskirts of San Jose, but it didn't seem to be particularly well connected with anything, least of all the local highways. Its only obvious neighbor was a flea market, which was just getting started as I arrived at the station on Saturday morning, but there are some new apartment buildings around the corner and under the viaduct that may or may not be within easy walking distance of the station.
This station is the nearest BART station to my house, but most of the time when I want to ride BART I'm going into San Francisco, so I drive to Daly City instead. (My closest heavy rail train station is Diridon in San Jose; my closest light rail station is in Campbell and I've never been there, because it's not really set up as a park-and-ride. The only passenger trains on the Santa Cruz side of the mountain are excursion trains.)
I paid for parking and entered the station, a normal island platform in the middle of two tracks on an elevated viaduct. Soon a train arrived to take me north to Oakland.
My ride up the East Bay was slightly delayed by track work around Hayward. I disembarked at Lake Merritt Station, one of BART's original stations, the last station on the trunk line before the Oakland Wye, and headed up to the ground level to find the party. I found a big tent set up on the street with a presentation in progress, showing a mixture of remarks from various local leaders and recorded remarks from Nancy Pelosi and Pete Buttigieg, while people pulled items out of the BART time capsules and put items in the new time capsule.
Around the corner from the tent with the main stage presentation was a row of food trucks. In the plaza itself, located more or less directly above the underground tracks, was the rest of the party, featuring a twelve-foot section of broad-gauge BART track, set up with rails bolted to wooden ties resting on ballast, with all of the electrical cables necessary to supply power to this section of track. A third rail rested on insulated pylons next to the tracks, with a warning that it's energized (though obviously not in this case; this was just about the only case where it was safe to touch the third rail.)
I may use this selfie with the tracks next time I need a profile photo, though my selfie lens was a bit smudged so the photo came out a bit muted.
BART brought out its Bartmobile, the almost-cheesy grinning mascot modeled after the streamlined A-stock trains, looking like Thomas the Tank Engine's great-nephew with its big cartoon eyes and molded plastic grin. I've seen Bartmobile in multiple Pride parades and Lunar New Year parades, but this was the first time I got to see the mascot up close. (Inside the big door it was clear that the Bartmobile was powered by a golf cart.)
I ate tacos from one of the food trucks lined up on the street then reentered the fray to stand in line for the merch tent. (This line was not to be confused with the Bartable schwag give-away tent; the lines stood in parallel running across the plaza. The merch line seemed shorter but moved more slowly.)
While I waited I saw El Bart Man, the masked wrestler whose origin story involves a run-in with a radioactive BART train, posing in front of Bartmobile.
Once I made it to the front of the merch line I bought an "Old Boi/New Boi" t-shirt, showing the original streamlined A-stock trains (originally futuristic when they were first deployed in 1972, now they're retro-futuristic) compared to the new blocky D-stock trains, and a pair of stickers with the same designs. I could have bought the same things through BART's official merch store online, but somehow it seemed significant to purchase the merch at the party itself.
Along the side of the plaza were a series of booths occupied by various organizations involved in BART in some way. A number of the booths represented engineering firms that were involved in the original construction of the system and its continued upkeep. One of the booths had a 3D-printed model section of the Transbay Tube section that could be submerged in a plastic tub to show how the tunnel was built into the bottom of the bay.
I left the party on the plaza and walked to Lake Merritt. I walked along the western shore of the lake then headed into downtown. I stopped for coffee on Broadway in downtown Oakland, then headed into 19th Street Station to catch a train back to the South Bay. This proved easier said than done because I had walked to the north side of the Oakland Wye and there were only two trains per hour running south; the rest of the trains were heading west through the Transbay Tube as if they were going to take office workers into their jobs in the Financial District. I carefully checked the schedule and decided that it would be slightly faster to ride one of these trains to West Oakland, then transfer to a southbound train to San Jose. This was not precisely convenient but did get me back to San Jose, after celebrating BART's birthday in Oakland.
