After delays, new BART cars may come
BART riders hoping that relief from crowded, noisy and worn-down trains was around the corner will have to wait a little longer, agency officials said last week.
Engineers in July initially said the first train of BART’s new fleet — a $2.6 billion project to replace its 669 cars with 775 new ones — would start carrying passengers sometime before the end of September. That never happened.
And now, BART officials are acknowledging that the state’s regulatory agency, the California Public Utilities Commission, has yet to sign off on thousands of pages of testing documentation, a process that is expected to take roughly 21 days, before it will certify the new cars are safe. At the same time, two train operators said they have doubts about whether BART can train the more than 400 operators on the new equipment before Thanksgiving, when officials hope to put the first new train into service.
It plans to have 20 cars — or two 10-car trains — in service by the end of the year, with production ramping up quickly after the first train is certified, said John Garnham, the project manager for BART’s new fleet.
“In my opinion, it is an unrealistic goal,” said one train operator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity be-
cause the operator is not authorized to speak to the media.
But BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost said training won’t be an issue. Though only 3 percent of its train operators have completed the full training program, Trost said there will be enough operators certified in the new equipment when the first cars roll onto the tracks.
“As more new cars become available, more operators will be certified to operate the new cars,” she said, adding that not all operators need to be certified at once.
That might create a scheduling nightmare, said another train operator, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. That’s because train operators pass off the train at the end of the line to another employee, who returns the train to its starting point for the morning commute. The union that represents train operators at BART did not return requests for comment.
“So, they would have to train everyone or make sure that the route they plan on using … has everyone trained,” the train operator said.
He hasn’t received direction on when he will start the second phase of the three-pronged training cycle, and Trost confirmed BART is “holding off” on doing the third and final phase of testing, a five-day program in mainline operations, until “everything has been worked out on the cars.”
For Oakland resident Daniel Cotten, the new train cars can’t come soon enough. A nearly daily rider, Cotten said he’s tired of the chaotic morning commute, when passengers are constantly jostling for space. BART plans to add the new trains onto the system without taking away old trains to create near-term capacity improvements before it starts retiring the old cars. Ultimately, the agency would like to have 1,081 train cars in its fleet, which works out to a nearly 50 percent boost in passenger capacity.
“There are a lot of riders eager to get to work, but typically, there’s not a lot of trains available,” he said. “People are often squishing on each other.”
Although disappointed at hearing of the continued testing delays, BART board Director Joel Keller, who chairs the operations subcommittee, said testing must be meticulous to ensure the cars are issue-free when they begin arriving.
“It’s probably better to fix (any issues) here on the cars that have already been delivered,” Keller said. “Once the engineering team is satisfied the cars will function in an operational environment, we’ll be able to get moving on the delivery of the cars.”
And there have been problems aplenty. Testing got off to a rocky start in April 2016, when the first test car slowly slid off the test tracks in Hayward and landed in a sand berm. Though the $2.2 million car was not damaged, the incident revealed a troubling issue with the cars’ powersupply system, which provides electricity to everything from the lights to the doors and communications system, along with a pump that replenishes brake fluid on the car’s secondary braking system.
Once engineers stabilized those issues, Garnham said staff had to contend with glitches in the cars’ automatic train control system, and a battery of other software problems. But, setbacks aside, Garnham said testing is inching along and nearing completion. Staff has checked off nearly all of the 1,872 safety elements requiring certification, he said, completing all but five documents out of nearly 3,000.
While most of the hardware changes have already been made, Garnham said engineers were still having issues of late with the brakes, which are jerking, rather than gliding, to a stop. In other cases, such as the computer network on the cars or the equipment’s ability to handle heat, Garnham said engineers are just waiting for Bombardier to return the requisite paperwork so BART can submit it to the Public Utilities Commission.
The agency this month plans to accept the first of the production vehicles, or train cars that have already incorporated design changes identified during testing. After that, Garnham said, getting the production cars into service will take much less time.
“It’s very quick,” he said. “Once we get into production, the cars will start to roll out fairly quickly.”
They agency will need to make up for lost time. BART initially hoped to get the first production vehicle in December last year, later revising that estimate to May, and now, October. Agency officials have said in the past they need a certain number of new cars up and running by the time the new Berryessa station in the South Bay opens, projected for mid-2018, in order to maintain its current level of service. The agency is counting on the train manufacturer, Bombardier Inc., to speed up production, though the company has had at least two high-profile cases of missing such deadlines in the recent past.
The Toronto Star reported in August that Bombardier had shipped unfinished streetcars to the Canadian city’s transit commission to meet its delivery targets. The Quebec-based rail manufacturer had struggled to deliver the 204-vehicle order, valued at around $1 billion, and two years after receiving the first streetcar was delivered, agency officials still had concerns about Bombardier’s manufacturing process, including failing control switches, leaking windows, incorrect parts and other deficiencies, according to meeting minutes between the transit commission and rail manufacturer obtained by The Star.
Bombardier also lost out on a chance to bid on a Metropolitan Transportation Authority contract in New York after falling 12 to 24 months behind schedule on delivery of 300 subway cars on an earlier contract, The Globe and Mail reported. In a statement released last week, state Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, urged BART to be more transparent about Bombardier’s capabilities.
But Garnham said production is not the issue. BART initially agreed to have all the new cars in service by 2023, but after delays in design and testing, Bombardier agreed to produce the cars at a faster rate, meaning all the new cars would be delivered by the end of 2021. That’s looking more like the beginning of 2022, Garnham said. That is, if the cars perform as expected.
“Production-wise, Bombardier is pretty good,” he said. “We’ll look at the cars’ performance and we’ll look at their production rate … and if we’re confident with them, we’ll let them (ramp up production).”