All I have to say to this "ya what mate?" Electrifying the rail lines in the East Bay and adding capacity for hourly service to Sacramento with EMUs would be far cheaper than boring a 20 mile tunnel from Oakland to Concord. Not to mention doing so would come off as being colossally stupid to the tax payers who's property taxes are going to go up to pay for it. The second transbay tube is already estimated to cost between $6 and $12 billion. Hell even connecting Richmond to the NWP makes more financial sense than a 20 mile tunnel! Hell electrifying 3000 miles of track in the whole state would probably cost less than boring 20+ miles of tunnel!
Isn't the BART bay tunnel more or less a replacement for the old Key System tracks on the lower level of the bridge. Not a one on one replacemnet obviously, but broadly doing the same thing, only doing it better seeing the Key System finished at Transbay (as far as I know) wheras BART provides one seat journeys to many places beyond. . Wan't BART already being planned when the Key system shut down?
But aren't there also plans to develop that land, once the Transbay extension is operational?
I’m not 100% sure on that, I know there wouldn’t be any staging AT the Transbay terminal, so any staging would have to be at 4th and king where it is now (theoretically)
Well replacing it with track only BART could use was a bad idea.
Using Indian gauge was seen as being better able to hold up to winds on the Golden Gate Bridge. Originally BART was planned to go over a to be built lower deck of the Golden Gate. The figured wide base=more stable trains. Marin county pulled out late in the design process that they kept the gauge. Not to mention subway systems don't generally directly connect with heavy or light rail anyways. The only place where this can happen in the US is one of Boston's subway lines and even it doesn't interchange with them. And from what I understand, that one line needs FRA compliant equipment which makes it more expensive to run compared to the other lines.
They do it something like this. This is in Switzerland where many local trains are narrow guage and the rest not.
The Key System tracks could only be used by Key System trains, so you could say they were perpetuating an old concept.
It's a bit complicated (the history of London Underground that is). Some of the outer bits of the London Ungerground were originally just regular rail lines. Steam engines pulled the trains in the early days (engines could be changed over at the limits of the electrified sections) and there was even a considerable amount of freight on the outer sections until circa the 1950s. By the 1920s, some such lines were jointly exploited by the main line rail companies and the Underground. For example there were a number of 1938-stock tube trains that were actually owned by LNER, and many sections of track in the outer area were shared (and still are today to a lesser extent, although some of the more rural lines have been cut back over the years). The Great Western similarly allowed the Underground to electrify the branch from Paddington to Hammersmith but chose not to get involved in the actual operations, but instead continued running a small number of their own steam trains on that line until the 1950s. It was mostly freight but also the occasional excursion train for football matches and such. South of the Thames there are sections of line, for example at Wimbledon, shared by very intensive services alternating between third rail electrified main line trains and 4th rail electrified Underground trains.
They won't. Reinventing the wheel is never a good idea. BART ended up having to be redesigned to be more like traditional trains, because the aircraft engineers who designed BART were arrogant idiots. They didn't even understand why conical wheels were necessary and idiotically used cylindrical wheels (something only being fixed today with the most recent car order).BART was partly a replacement for the Key system and used some of its right of way, but as originally designed (i.e. with Marin and San Mateo counties), and even as eventually built, it went beyond what the Key system did. The lower deck of the Bay Bridge was designed to support the Key system, which was essentially light rail. It wasn't for freight or other heavy rail uses.
In retrospect, using a different gauge was probably a mistake, but it made sense at the time. BART was envisioned to be a space age replacement for commuter trains – computer controlled (drivers would only have an emergency stop button) and with 90 second headways, which is why the original cars didn't have straps or grab bars – there would be so many trains that everyone would have a seat. At the time, making BART tracks compatible with legacy rail made as much sense as designing the cars to be able to run on highways.
BART was the Hyperloop of its day. We can only hope things turn out better for Elon.
Newark City Subway, RiverLine, PATH, and the NYC Subway all have interchanges with mainline rail. In NYC, it's generally only used for deliveries of subway cars though. Newark City Subway has freight activity, and RiverLine has *substantial* freight activity.
Wait, does that mean BART trains rely on flanges to stay on the rails? Isn't that going to be horrifically noisy and inefficient?
Yes older BART equipment is ungodly loud when the enter the Oakland Subway between MacArthur and 19th St.
Ding ding ding, you are correct.
So MARTA, Washington Metro, Chicago and various other light rail systems don't interact with heavy rail beyond delivery and maintenance? That very much takes away from the need to make sure BART can interconnect with standard trains. From what I have gathered, North America has gotten away running through trains and subways down the same tracks. Until the Antioch extension opened on BART last year, there really wasn't a place on the eastern end of the BART system for them to connect with a standard gauge train that would make any sense. The Richmond-Fremont like runs parallel to the SP mainline. The Transbay part is the only part that would make sense, but BART has its own height and none of the tracks to the east are electrified.
