Courtesy: BART
Years in the making, BART’s Fleet of the Future is beginning to look like a thing of the past.
The agency will temporarily stop accepting new rail cars on Jan. 8 to give the manufacturer time to resolve some reliability issues. They’ll have 290 Fleet of the Future cars on hand at that point, according to a release.
That’s just 60 more than they expected to have by the end of 2018, a KTVU investigation reported when looking at maintenance issues the agency initially experienced. BART officials said then that reliability was the concern and not safety, which is similar to how they describe the present setbacks.
The new cars received from Bombardier Transportation routinely stop while in service and stay stalled until the operator reboots the system, resulting in delays up to 10 minutes, BART said.
Additionally, there are issues with the wheels. When these trains stop under wet or rainy conditions the wheels can develop flat spots and the cars need to be removed from service to have them resurfaced.
Neither setback is said to affect safety but they can impact service.
BART signed a $1.5 billion contract with Bombardier in 2012. With added costs and amendments, the entire project totals $2.5 billion in taxpayer money.
The pause in delivery is expected to last twelve weeks. In response, some of the 618 legacy cars will be decommissioned at a slower rate as they make room for new ones.
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