Everything You Need to Know about BART's Legacy Fleet!

foreign [Music] [Music] this is Josh and that's Jordan and we're both from Rapido trains Inc and we're here today at Bart's Richmond repair facility at the Richmond yard in California and we're looking at the uh the BART cars in uh kind of honor of our recent launch of our hoscale models yep we also brought a third guy but I'm not sure where he is he's probably hiding under a car somewhere foreign [Music] anyways so we're going to be doing some measurements today we've already got a lot of our atrial scale model down pat but we want to make sure some details are kind of the correct size and whatnot so uh we're gonna be using measuring yeah and we're also going to be talking with someone from Bart on a lot of the history of the car and a lot of the finer details that we still need to learn yep so why don't we jump right into the Prototype details now so I'm here with Jay saute we're in Legacy a car 11.95 you can see the number up there and I thought this would be a good time to go over the history of the bark cars and give us some prototype info so why don't you take it away absolutely so uh Bart's starting 50 this year and so are a lot of the cars we're actually still using a large part of the original fleet which is pretty uh pretty unconventional it's one of the oldest fleets of the country as a result of that so these cars the Legacy Fleet the A and B Originals were put into service with the opening of the system and were built by raw industry the same as your turbo liner yeah uh and these actually some of the last raw equipment that you can ride today but we are still running them uh into the dirt here at Bart uh just because they are still working for us the future that we have now though it's been in service for a while so we need to come up with a new name because it's about to be the fleet of the present yep yep uh those are the D and the E the D have full width cabs the E's are the center cars and that's the whole bark Fleet you know it's we've been here 50 years there's five car types the a cars are iconic to the area with the streamlined cab specifically designed because in the late 60s when Bart was being built the idea of Just Like Trains as a whole especially for passengers not very popular yeah even like Subways and metros like so it's not only like all of your passenger trains the late 60s were in Decline so they tried really hard to make Bart as untrained as possible while still having it be a train uh you know we looked at some stuff earlier from the archives they thought about making this a monorail like a suspended monorail or rubber tires and thankfully ended up with this uh totally conventional supported track system uh rather than anything a bit stranger foreign but it's a great design I mean it's it's actually it's one of those kind of Timeless designs that you don't really need to change exactly and I mean that's like largely these trains have gotten pretty beat up but like how forward how successfully Forward Thinking Bart was yep for the 60s you know in some of the earlier proposals we have like retro it looking like 50 stuff and it would not have aged as well like the fact that this was 60s designed 70s built could have aged really badly and these these cars are still iconic and you know they're beautiful I think that's part of the reason they're so well it comes right out of the Space Age yeah in fact following stuff like one of my favorite um things so these were designed by Sunbird Ferrar who have done a bunch of other designs and trains um that you know they're a popular famous industrial designer but working for severographer at the time uh and who actually worked on the bar Crush Was Sid Mead who became this unbelievably famous sci-fi concept artist after being an industrial designer and designing the BART cars so he later did so it's like if you ever look at his resume it's like Bart cars yeah and then Blade Runner and Tron Blade Runner was one of my favorite movies yeah so the whole idea was to sell this as this modern clean automated rapid transit system so we needed a space age design they've been beaten up since but they've held up there's a big rebuild in the early 90s yep yep but that was mostly a propulsion thing you know the Interiors were modernized and changed they removed some seats for for accessible areas and for bicycles areas and things but like they're almost identical I don't know if there's any system that has had so little Evolution and such a long time using its original fleet [Music] what's the top speed 70 something uh these could these can do 80 but they run them at 70. uh to keep schedules and for reduced wear and tear but sometimes if you translate to get back on schedule they'll actually you know open the throttle all the way up which is pretty cool so you can do 80 and you know pass the cars on the freeway which is always the design oh yeah exactly you're competing in the 60s you're competing with kind of a car Revolution I remember seeing I've seen some videos in the past there's stuff on YouTube and just going over some of the the highway proposals that they were looking at in San Francisco in the in the 50s and 60s and just what could have been and my my favorite one of those was they needed the increased capacity across the Golden Gate so they thought the one of my plans was we'll build the second Golden Gate Bridge next to the first one we'll have them be paired and thankfully Bart kind of prevented us from some of those really car Centric outcomes that would have changed the skyline exactly exactly technically the the organization that manages Bart is the BART district there a rapid transit district and at the very beginning they did the acronym for the whole thing so Bart D or bartender if you really want to pronounce it doesn't sound but somebody pretty quickly realized that bartender yeah is not the way to sell your transit system so they went straight for Bart um and it stuck since we're using the same logo which has been fantastic so you know you can see this great archival stuff and they've got the classic you've got it on the hard hat I'm pointing to my non-existent heart yeah but you know it's been there since the start it's people say it evokes the transbay tube with the two holes but uh it's apparently not designed for that so it's just a nice coincidence Bart kind of exists in this strange halfway point between your usual like subway system like you'd see in New York or Chicago or Toronto and your commuter rail system like you'd see in New York or Chicago or Toronto but we kind of hit right in between so you know we're up at Richmond right now there are trains here that run direct to San Jose uh and that rides about an hour and 20 minutes on one of these uh and is our longest line is 60 miles which is twice the length of the longest in New York you know we're almost at the point where we need a cafe car it's probably not a bad idea I mean I've I've been pushing for it maybe I'll have to get one of the models and and yes custom detail it myself and then pitch it and be like hey you can do how nice this is we'll make a video out of that about playing like passengers see and it's you know b-a-r-t for Bart just b-a-r you know lowercase T we're already there [Music] yeah so we've talked a bit about the a cars uh so what about we've got the B cars and the C cars why don't you talk about those for uh for just a couple minutes for sure so the B cars are the center cars so no cab on either end yep and those are also from the original system uh most of them and some big cars that we have today are actually eight cars that have the cabs removed because uh you know for all for how futuristic the a cars looked uh they weren't very practical uh Bart had used to change the lengths of trains a lot more we still change them a lot you'll see moves in yards of drilling cars back and forth and having specific end cars that were directional uh became a huge operational annoying absolutely I can see that so uh by the late 80s the mid to late 80s they introduced the C car which is essentially it's a 70 foot long car with a flat end like the b car but it has a cab on the end so it can be used either in the middle of the trains they've got a fold out door with a pop-out diaphragm which is actually pretty funky uh but you'll be able to you can walk through and cross through so they can have those in the middle and have them open or or they can have them on the end of cars and they just close the passage door they close the front diaphragm door and it's a full width cap so the the first batch of C's the c1s were awesome and then we went and contracted out with MK uh to do the c2s which were the second batch they are identical like functionally completely identical uh the c2s were a bit of problem children though so those have all been retired actually uh we finished our time of those a year or two ago uh to see ones are still in service they're being retired next and we're actually about to be left with kind of the dream of original Bart we'll be back of A's and B's at least with the Legacy Fleet now um get a lot of people ask us already kind of what kind of prompted this whole project come together so we reached out to you guys yeah actually you know it's it's our 50th Anniversary the uh Legacy Fleet is due to be retired fairly soon and we wanted to kind of pay respects to an icon so we're like we need to get a model made uh in the past people at Bart had reached out to other people uh and not really gotten great responses and I just joined and I'm like I know the perfect guys for this we have weird Oddball 60s 70s retro equipment made by Roar I know just who to ask and so you asked the weird Oddball model train company exactly who love 60 70 stuff and stuff made by Roar exactly exactly it ended up you know it's sort of a match made in heaven uh you know I was so excited like literally I'm sure you could go back and see my emails and things like they got back to me this is so like they're interested in it and you know I think all I had to do I had to get some little turbo Turbo train merchandise put it on the shelf behind me for the first couple calls and sold yeah as soon as the boss saw that that's all you had to do so yeah so you had your attention so it's a it's been a fantastic to work with you guys so far as well and you know to be able to do them Justice too you know the the only time that I've ever been models of Bart they look like a kid's drawing a fart almost they are so crude they're not proportional and just we need to do it properly and we need to get the people who we knew could do it properly exactly so on that note why don't we head over to Josh I think he's around here somewhere it might be actually underneath looking at some uh some details and doing some measurements uh we'll go over to Josh he can talk about the models and some of the features we're putting into them thanks Jordan so I'm actually under one of the B cars right now 1694 to be exact and uh I'm actually in a spot where there's a little bit of Headroom because uh right here in the pit it's not exactly my six foot one inch clearance so uh I'm actually going to talk now about some of the details on like underneath this car and what's going to appear on the model and some of the operating characteristics that we hope to achieve with the model now one thing to note is that these designs are not yet finalized but I will touch on a couple of the unique details we've designed into these Bart models as well as some others that we're still working on first let's look at some of the exterior details intermediate couplers between the cars will use a drawbar and an nem coupling system most commonly found on European models this allows the train to look prototypical on straight sections with very little gap between each car yet still allows operation around cars down to 18 inch radius we're using the same design on our Aurora turbo liner model hey another Roar product how about that the front coupler on the a cars will be a dummy coupler but it will feature the prototypical swing under design so that it can be tucked out of the way just like in normal operations on the C cars we'll be updating the design to include the nem style coupler pocket so that either the dummy coupler can be used for Aesthetics or you can insert the regular drawbar connection and use these cars within the middle of your contest just like the Prototype the front illuminated sign above the cab on the a cars added in later years and not a future of the early cars when built will be changed to an optional detail part so that modelers can add it or not depending on the Prototype era they wish to replicate name plates on the sides of the cars will be pre-painted and included in the polybag we are still working out the details but the plan is to include blank plates and a decal sheet featuring a selection of predetermined numbers as well as number jumbles for you to completely customize your model to the exact number you would like looking between the cars the metal guards will be included with each model for the customer to install separately simply because there's such a small detail part and we don't want to see these get damaged during shipping now let's take a look at the underbody details the entire underbody has been designed based on Blueprints and drawings graciously provided by the staff at Bart While most of the detail will be molded into the chassis to reduce the number of small parts the level of detail is still what customers expect to find under a repeatable model looking closely underneath the floor and between some of the equipment boxes we've managed to hide the motor and drive shaft so that it is entirely hidden from regular View and we cannot forget about the highly detailed trucks now before I go any further yes they're standard gauge trucks and not broad gauge trucks gauge well I thought Rapido prided itself on prototypical accuracy I am a gas at this unconscionable violation of my human rights this is not the way well the simple answer is we wanted these to be as accurate as possible but within the limitations of the hobby no one makes accurate broad gauge tracks for these trains to run on and we certainly weren't going to force you to handle your own Bart tracks to the correct gauge on elevated viaducts with all the third rail detail too actually that would be kind of cool we've even had some people suggest that we shrink the model so that ho gauge tracks look like broad gauge but then it just wouldn't be an HO scale model would it finally let's go over some of the lighting features these trains will feature working directional headlights and red tail lights they'll also have working interior lights and each car can be turned on and off with the included magnetic wand because the couplers between the cars will feature electrical connections these trains will literally be all-wheel pickup so you'll have no issues running through special switches or track work and you'll have flicker free lighting for the entire train length our offering of HO scale Bart cars will be available in powered Abba sets either with or without DCC sound individual c cars again with or without DCC and sound and add on B coaches so that you can make your trade as long as humanly possible also for those who might not have a full-fledged Bart layout with all those awesome stations in viaducts but you would still like to celebrate this Transit icon we'll be offering unpowered a cars in a display case that you can put on your desk or your bookshelf or mantle or dining room table or nightstand or coffee table or dashboard or well thanks for joining us here at Bart's Richmond repair facility we've had a great time we've looked at the prototypes we talked about the models and uh yeah this has been great thanks of course to you Jay for helping us kind of put this whole project together and having a great launch it's been fantastic thank you yeah and we have an order deadline a conditional order deadline coming up yeah so the conditional order deadline for these trains is uh January the 15th 2023. if you get your pre-orders in by that point you'll also get a five percent discount applied to your order it's also kind of our cutoff date so by that point we will get an idea of how many uh people want to get this model and if we're going to get enough orders to actually make it worthwhile so if you really want one get your orders in by January the 15th and you can order that directly through uh through our website rapidotrains.com your favorite retailer or even Bart's own store at railgoods.com and already I can say the orders have been terrific so we're really optimistic that this is going to uh to go through and we'll we'll uh after that kind of conditional deadline we can start looking at doing some tooling that's awesome it is it is you guys do know it's broad gauge right broad gauge frog gauge foreign over the whole gauge thing you don't need to make another joke about it I thought your videos are supposed to be professional [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] so close so here we are in the shops I'm with Jay chatee you're getting shops like latte there will definitely be a blooper reel though that works too so I'm here with Jason I'm not like this is like okay okay

Channel: rapidotrains

Views: 23,637

Keywords: bart, bay area rapid transit, legacy fleet, transit, ho scale, rapido, rapdio, rapido trains, rapdio trains

Id: aYmkBT2XkFE

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2022