BART officially retired its fleet of original train cars at a retirement ceremony and final ride in April 2024. The legacy fleet served the Bay Area for more than 50 years.
As BART’s legacy cars have a tremendous sentimental value with passengers in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, BART gave the public the opportunity to submit proposals for repurposing retired cars.
BART launched the official call for proposals in January 2021 through the release of a Pre-Qualification Application Process, and 20 individuals and organizations submitted proposals.
Selected Proposals to Repurpose a Legacy Car
Eight recipients were selected after submitting a proposal to BART describing what they planned to do with the vehicle. The selected few will transform the old cars into beer gardens and short-term rentals, museum objects and more.
None of the proposals sought to use the legacy cars for affordable housing projects or homes for the unhoused – two of the major problems facing the San Francisco Bay Area. Other public transit agencies have sunk their legacy cars into the ocean to serve as artificial reefs, but this is unfeasible for BART’s cars due to their aluminum composition. Likewise, BART cannot sell the cars to other transit agencies because its vehicles operate on a nonstandard gauge (track width).
Courtesy Arthur Mac's Tap & Snack
Arthur Mac’s Tap & Snack
A mainstay for pizza, hot wings, and beer in Oakland, Arthur Mac’s Tap & Snack plans to expand – by adding a BART car to its retinue in downtown Hayward. The restaurant wants to see the legacy car used purely for fun – it will transform the car into a “retro videogame arcade and kids play area,” as well as extra seating for weatherproof dining. Arthur Mac’s – an anagram in tribute of the MacArthur BART Station – said its vision for the legacy car “is to create a time capsule that transports our customers and community members beyond the confines of time and space.”
Courtesy Hospitality in Transit
Hospitality in Transit
The BART puns don’t stop there. Hospitality in Transit, the purveyors of “metrobar” – built from an old Metro car in Washington D.C. – intend to bring a similar concept to the Bay Area with “BARTbar.” To be placed at a yet-to-be-decided location, the primarily outdoor venue will serve as a coworking space, café and meeting place during the day and transition to a beverage-slinging joint by night. “We hope BARTbar will bring people together through local drinks, food, art, and culture,” the partners of Hospitality in Transit said. “We’re committed to being a space that supports and uplifts Bay Area creators and communities."
Courtesy the Western Railway Museum
Bay Area Electric Railroad Association - Delivered Aug., Sept., Oct 2024
The Bay Area Electric Railroad Association, which runs the Western Railway Museum in Suisun City, plans to create a “Rapid Transit History Center” with one A, B and C car each to educate visitors about earlier modes of transportation. The museum will include various displays, a small theater, BART artifacts, and a history of the transit system. The project is currently seeking donations. On Friday, Aug. 9, the museum received the first of its three cars -- A car #1164.
Courtesy Hayward Fire Department
Hayward Fire Department - Delivered Dec. 2022
A legacy BART car may soon help save lives. That’s the plan for the Hayward Fire Department, who intend to repurpose their car as a training “prop” to provide “station familiarization, vehicle rescue simulations and safety of the track and third rail system.” The department plans to keep its car “for many years” and noted that they will provide continuous maintenance and repairs.
Courtesy Hernandez-Eli Architecture
Residence and short-term rental
A partnership of private residents will transform a legacy car into a “metaphoric train station that blends the space age-modern esthetics of BART and a cozy cabin” in a Gold Rush-era town in the Sierra Foothills. The structure will be constructed as green as possible, with a solar panel roof, a gray water system and passive cooling, the partnership said. The owners hope to see the house last upwards of 100 years.
Courtesy the Original Scraper Bike Team
The Original Scraper Bike Team
The Original Scraper Bike Team works to enrich and empower urban youth in East Oakland by offering bicycle skill training, mentorship programs, and by encouraging creativity and art. The organization was awarded a legacy BART car that will be divided into two sections: One half will serve as a bike shop, which will provide free bike repairs and help children learn to build and decorate their own Scraper bike; the other half will be a clubhouse for community events and Scraper Bike Teams’ mentorship program. The car will be decorated with murals by local artists.
Selected but declined a car
Contra Costa County Fire Protection District
On January 8, 2024, the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District withdrew their request for the legacy car due to lack of funding to build a platform to accommodate training.
Oakland Athletics
On Nov 29, 2023, the Oakland A's informed BART that they have decided to decline the offer to take ownership of the BART car.
View and download our original Pre-Qualification for Proposals Brochure about the proposal process, guidelines, timeline and car measurements.
The remaining decommissioned legacy cars will be mostly recycled, a few cars at a time, by Schnitzer Steel in Oakland.
Decommissioning Process
The decommissioning is a complex process because BART will operate a mixed fleet of new and old cars for several years. The new and old cars can't join together in one train, but there will be full train sets made up of new and old cars running simultaneously. This will require balancing the operational need to expand service and lengthen trains, the Fleet of the Future delivery schedule, managing storage for all the train cars and deciding how and when to retire the legacy cars.
BART’s legacy fleet is composed of 59 A2 cars and 380 B2 cars (from the ‘70s; rehabbed in 1998 and 2002 and eligible for retirement in 2018 and 2022); 150 C1 cars (from the ‘80s, never rehabilitated, eligible for retirement in 2015 and 2018); and the generally worst-performing cars, 80 C2 cars (from the ‘90s, never rehabilitated, eligible for retirement in 2018 and 2021).
The car selection criteria for decommissioning will take into consideration the following, at a minimum:
- Reliability – Mean Time Between Incident (MTBI) and MTBI rate/1000 hours over a 12- and 24-month period. Decommission “repeaters” or bad actors that impact service reliability
- Availability – Long term holds due to accident damage
- Exterior and interior condition
- Hours (total number of service hours the car has run)
- Time remaining on key components
- Status of component overhauls
- APSE (Auxiliary Power Supply Equipment) type
The majority of the old cars will be recycled. The Fleet Disposition Team will manage the process, including selecting which parts should be harvested from retired vehicles and choosing which cars with the highest failure rates get retired first. BART removes serviceable components such traction motors, axles, wheels, HVAC units, etc. that can still be used to maintain the existing fleet. This cost saving effort allows for serviceable components to be stored as spares, for use on the remaining legacy fleet. Hazardous materials are properly disposed of at the BART shop before the train car is sent to the scrap yard.
When the car has been completely picked over, typically, giant eye bolts are used to elevate the 60,000-pound car in the shop and carefully guide it onto the back of a low flatbed truck.
At the recycle facility, a huge machine crushes the car and breaks it into chunks.
Workers put the big chunks through a series of steps that sort out the different types of metal materials – mostly steel, aluminum and copper – and run them through a mega-shredder that can pulverize them into tinier pieces. It’s a finely tuned process that ends up sending metal materials, on either bulk cargo vessels or container ships, to mills and foundries around the world, to get new life when used in other products that, for example, support critical infrastructure and transportation projects.
One train car can yield up to 22 tons of metal – around 15 tons of steel, 6 tons of aluminum and 1 ton of copper. According to the Institute for Scrap Recycling Industries, recycling just 1 ton of steel conserves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal and 120 pounds of limestone. And, creating products from recycled steel instead of virgin ore uses 70% less energy and 40% less water and reduces mining wastes by 97%.
Some ideas that have caught the public’s eye in other places aren’t a good fit for the BART fleet. As an example, some carbon steel subway cars from other systems have been sunk into the ocean for use as part of an artificial reef, but the aluminum composition of BART cars prevents this from being feasible. Some agencies can sell off their train cars to be reused by other systems; BART, however, operates on a non-standard gauge or track width that wouldn’t work in most places.
View the September 10, 2020 Board of Directors presentation.
View the Jan. 10, 2019 Board of Directors presentation.
Email the project at [email protected]
Watch our video of the decommissioning and recycling process:
Why BART is unable to have a heritage fleet
BART has retired its legacy fleet and is unable to keep a heritage train on property due to limited funds, storage space, and equipment needs as outlined below. Instead, we are assisting the Western Railway Museum in their efforts to preserve a legacy train for public enjoyment for years to come.
Reasons we are unable to maintain a heritage train:
Storage Space is Limited. BART does not have the secure storage space for any heritage equipment. We now have more cars than we did before, and we will exceed the effective storage capacity of existing yards and tail tracks by fall of 2025. We are already planning on the need for alternative overnight storage such as station platforms for as many as 12 trainsets.
Equipment is Obsolete. The equipment to maintain legacy cars is antiquated, with many of the parts obsolete and scarce. Maintaining two types of vehicles requires separate inventory, maintenance, and operational costs, which will be higher than managing a single vehicle type.
Keeping a heritage train would require maintaining tooling and obsolete test equipment and retaining a significant chunk of inventory, that cannot be used on the new fleet, and would occupy valuable warehouse space where there is already limited space for the next generation of trains.
BART’s New Train Control System is not Compatible. The legacy cars are not compatible with our new Communications Based Train Control System coming online.
Regulatory Requirements. There are CPUC regulatory requirements for any car that will carry passengers. It would be a tremendous burden to keep a few cars in compliance. This also creates a training burden. BART would need to keep spending resources on training and recertifying Operators and Maintenance Personnel to operate and maintain a mixed fleet.