Hayward

Started: 2022-11-08 18:32:06

Submitted: 2022-11-08 20:43:09

Visibility: World-readable

It's a BART tour! A big BART tour!

As part of its effort to improve its public image as it tries to chart a sustainable path out of the COVID-19 pandemic, my favorite local transit agency BART opened its newest maintenance complex to a public tour on the last Thursday in October. It was the middle of the work week but I wasn't going to let that little detail get in the way of seeing inside the Hayward Maintenance Complex in its first public tour. This was technically a board meeting but I just wanted to see whatever they'd let me see.

I drove to South Hayward Station on Thursday morning to catch the shuttle to the Hayward Maintenance Complex. (I allowed a brief moment of hope that the shuttle would be a shuttle train that would pull off onto a siding at the maintenance complex, which would be an exciting way to travel to the complex on tracks not used for normal revenue service, but then I scrolled down and saw that the shuttle would be a bus departing from the parking lot in front of the station.) The bus was clearly filled with other transit nerds like myself; one visitor wore a t-shirt with a drawing of a steam engine that read, "I don't always stop to look at trains, oh wait I do." I wore the BART old boi/new boi tshirt I bought at the transit agency's birthday party in September.

The shuttle bus took us to the maintenance complex fifteen minutes away. When we turned off the main road into the complex I watched as we passed between a BART rail-grinding engineering train and a two-car new-stock EMU trainset on a level crossing (the only time I've ever crossed BART tracks at-grade). We pulled up to the building and disembarked ("Wave to BART Twitter" they said as we got off the bus) and stepped into the cavernous entrance to the complex.

The part of the complex that we got to see was relatively new, built after BART decided in 2009 that it actually needed to invest in the long-term maintenance of its fleet. We crowded into the several-story-tall room, topped with a gantry crane spanning the entire space, and listened to the BART board members open the board meeting and give their own remarks welcoming us to the event. I was close enough to the front that I could occasionally see the faces of the people who were talking in front of me, until the crowd shifted and they disappeared again. BART staff talked about the building we were in, and the staff and a union rep talked about a job-training program giving service staff a path to becoming train drivers and mechanics.

Then they opened the floor for public comment, with wireless microphones carried through the crowd, and I braced myself for comments from the public, but the people who chose to talk thanked BART for the opportunity to see the site.

The maintenance complex was a long building laid out parallel to BART's east bay trunk line, south of the storage yard visible from the tracks. We entered between the warehouse portion of the building and the component repair shop. The tour took us into the building to the right, along the main hallway down the middle of the building into tho component repair shop. There were bays open on either side of the hallway with equipment set up in them being repaired. The first bay I saw had a couple of AC units from the legacy fleet set up on wheeled stands.

There was a person standing in front of the caution tape answering questions (who turned out to be BART board member Robert Raburn), and I asked him about the rooms off to the side with plastic barriers hanging from the ceiling (they're used to test the AC units without cooling the entire room). While we were talking he asked what my BART stop was, and I said I lived in Santa Cruz so my nearest stop was either Berryessa or Daly City, depending where I was going. (Milbrae is maybe closer than Daly City, but Daly City has better service northbound into San Francisco, so I usually drive there.)

I continued walking down the hallway, sticking my head into the rooms as they came by. I saw many things: stacks of wheels in various states of assembly, train couplings disconnected from their chassis, bearings and bushings and sheaths stacked on shelves. There were so many mechanical things, stripped out of their context to be repaired or replaced or stripped for parts, but usually recognizable.

The next formal stop on the tour was the truck shop, where the board stopped to present the two axle presses on either side of the room, one designated for disassembling axles and one for reassembling them. (In addition to the axle presses, I was impressed by the multiple levels of gantry cranes above my head.)

There was a formal presentation at this stop, but I don't actually remember what they talked about; I spent more time gawking at the equipment in the newly-built immaculately-clean repair bay.

Sitting on a chair in front of the axle press was the control board from a legacy train, built with 1970s electronics: single-function ICs surrounded by large through-hole discrete components on double-sided circuit boards. One board had an 8086 in a DIP socket, functioning as a microcontroller running the train's control systems. This was the closest we got on the tour to the electrical repair shop upstairs on the second floor of the component repair shop.

At the back of the truck shop were axles and trucks in various states of disassembly and repair, lined up on broad-gauge tracks stretching to the far doors, representing what looked like enough wheels to serve dozens of cars and multiple complete trainsets.

We didn't get to see the mountain of paperwork that each repair generates, tracking everything done to every part across its operating history, following the parts as old rolling stock is retired and stripped for parts to keep the remaining legacy fleet running while waiting for all of the new D- and E-stock trains to come into service.

The last thing I saw on my way out of the maintenance complex was a room full of electric motors in various states of disassembly and repair, each sitting on their own stand waiting for the maintenance workers to return to put them back together and mount them on the bogies across the hall and return them to revenue service.

We stopped on the north side of the maintenance complex for a presentation about the planned next phases of the site. (This was the sales pitch of the board meeting: BART is trying to get environmental approvals to build a fleet maintenance facility and additional storage yard to service the new, expanded fleet they're putting into service.) One of the objectives of the new fleet maintenance facility is to start regular inspections of all rolling stock; apparently BART never quite got around to setting up regular inspections for the legacy fleet, preferring to run the cars into the ground and send them to the shop only once they started exhibiting problems in service. (This explains the less-than-stellar reliability of the legacy fleet when I lived in San Francisco and rode BART every day. By that time BART had begun to invest in maintenance and reliability, but that investment is only beginning to pay off.)

We walked outside the building back in the direction we'd come. I was amused to see the sign reading "truck shop", which didn't mean cargo-carrying road vehicles; BART calls that its "rubber fleet", to distinguish it from its regular (revenue) fleet and its non-revenue fleet.

At the southern end of the building, between the two-car new-fleet trainset (D-stock driving-cab car 3159, and E-stock passenger car 4066) and the rail-grinding engineering cars, the board gave its final remarks, and opened the floor one more time for public comment, with the promise of brief answers from the relevant BART officials present. (Only one of the public comments was the sort of rambling barely-coherent comment I feared when I heard "public comment"; the rest were more interesting comments and questions about BART's operations.)

Then the meeting wrapped up and I went to look at the driving-cab end of D-stock car 3159 sitting on the level crossing in front of the building. (Now that I look at this picture I don't see an obvious third rail to power the EMU; if one exists it must be hidden by the barricade at the very end of the second car in the picture below. The other possibility is that they towed the trainset here for the tour, and they had to tow it back to the nearest third rail to return the cars to the yard.) I've seen and ridden on D-stock trains in service, but I haven't had the opportunity to stand in front of one at ground level on the same tracks and look up into the windows of its driving cab.

I dropped by the rail grinder engineering trains, then headed back to catch the shuttle bus back to South Hayward Station. I'd seen the inside of BART's newest maintenance complex in its first public tour

I grabbed lunch at a small taqueria in Hayward (they called my order number in Spanish, which seemed like a good sign), then headed across the bay to my office in Mountain View for a couple of hours.