HAYWARD — Workers from BART’s Hayward repair shop looked on Friday morning as a massive crane hoisted one of the agency’s old fleet of train cars onto the back of an extra-long flatbed bound for an Oakland steel yard.
Train number 2528 was the first of 669 “legacy” BART cars that will be taken out of service over the next several years as the agency replaces those models with its sleek new “Fleet of the Future.” On Friday, the car sat stripped out in the cavernous maintenance garage, the padding gone from its seats, wires hanging from its skeletal ceiling, stripes on its exterior faded to a pale blue.
One might think that for BART workers, who kept the car running as it covered an estimated 2.2 million miles during its time in the system, watching the first member of the old fleet take a final trip out of the shop would be an emotional moment — the beginning of an end of an era.
But train number 2528 didn’t have many friends in the shop.
“There’s not much nostalgia,” BART spokesman Jim Allison said.
This car was a problem child, plagued with seemingly nonstop issues, Allison and others said. It would roll into the shop for repairs, get fixed up, then head back out into service — only to break down again an hour later, causing delays throughout the system.
It came from a troublesome generation of BART cars that entered service in the mid-1990s but, despite being decades younger than other models in the fleet, wound up needing repairs far more often.
Train number 2528 was permanently taken out of service in 2014, less than 20 years after it had started running.
“It was more trouble than it was worth to keep it going,” Allison said.
There are many ideas for what could become of the old fleet of BART cars. A few will probably wind up in train and transportation museums. Others could become features in parks, or art installations, or even housing — repurposed much like shipping containers.
Train number 2528, though, was bound for an industrial shredder, the aluminum in its frame set to be broken down and recycled. BART’s staff had already stripped the car of any parts that might still be usable on the other old cars.
This was the first of 10 cars that Oakland’s Schnitzer Steel purchased from BART for a total of $1,150 as part of a pilot program meant to figure out exactly how much the old fleet is worth. The company will recycle the cars over the next several months.
The program will help BART determine what it can expect to get for the rest of the legacy fleet once its cars go on the market in the future, when artists and developers and metal scrappers will be able to bid for them.
Matt Pleli, a senior production engineer now overseeing BART’s project decommissioning the old fleet, said the agency has “no idea” how much people might pay for the old cars.
One reason is that trying to find a new life for a 20-ton train car comes with logistical challenges, starting with the difficulty of taking possession of one. Workers and a truck driver sent by Schnitzer Steel spent a couple of hours Friday working out how to transport the train car, which was so long its last 10 feet hung off the back of the flatbed.
BART has so far received 120 of the new train cars from manufacturer Bombardier. Fifty-eight of them are currently running through the system, several of which rattled past the Hayward shop on Friday as one of their forebears was being put out to pasture.
The Canadian company announced plans earlier this year to open a facility manufacturing the new BART cars in Pittsburg. A Bombardier spokeswoman said Friday that the company plans to begin operations at the facility later this year.
Once more of those train cars are phased in, BART won’t have any use — or any room — for the old fleet, and more cars will roll out of the big garage doors on the backs of trucks.
There will probably be more nostalgia for those cars that date back to BART’s opening in the 1970s, Allison said. But on Friday, saying a first goodbye to train number 2528 wasn’t hard.
“It served the public well for a while, but it’s time to go,” Allison said.
