Bay Area Rapid Transit will continue to operate a bus bridge for riders traveling between Pittsburg/Bay Point and North Concord/Martinez stations through at least Monday.
In the meantime, we are hard at work on solutions on two fronts: 1) identifying and resolving the electrical problem that is damaging train cars and 2) repairing the damaged train cars and returning them to service.
AN ELECTRICAL PROBLEM
“What’s occurring is that when a train is traveling over the section of track between North Concord and Bay Point, it experiences a high spike in voltage and that is damaging a piece of the propulsion equipment on some train cars,” said BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost.
“There’s no safety risk or concern for any of the passengers, even the ones riding on that exact car that’s having the propulsion equipment failure,” she said. “But we have shut down that section of track because we can’t afford to damage any more train cars; we already have a limited number of cars in our fleet,” she said.
REPAIRING DAMAGED CARS
While one team focuses on finding and fixing the electrical problems, technicians in BART shops are working round the clock to repair the damaged cars as quickly as safely possible.
The fleet would typically run around 579 cars during a weekday morning commute. On Friday, we had 521 cars in service (See infographic below from archive, outlining numbers in our fleet, as they stood before this latest electrical issue.)
A new Fleet of the Future is on the way to bring some relief to crowded cars (more info at www.bart.gov/cars), however, other infrastucture needs such as replacing old rails, updating train control equipment, expanding maintenance facilities and rebuilding other parts of the system must be dealt with as well.
TIPS FOR RIDERS
Riders should listen to station staff and public address announcements for the latest information when arriving to the stations. Announcements will be made if train service is an option between Pittsburg/Bay Point and North Concord. If traveling between these two stations, riders are encouraged to allow for extra travel time. The bus trip takes between 10-25 minutes. To be kept up-to-date you can sign up for our news feed and BART Service Advisories at www.bart.gov/alerts
You can also keep track of train lengths and train times with our real time departure information.
We apologize for this inconvenience and we are working around the clock to identify the problem and fix it. We would like to thank our riders for their patience and our transit partners for providing the bus bridge.
