4 ms·

If you look, you’ll be unable to find a metro system in the US that does not have custom rolling stock. BART has unique requirements, but you’ll see that everyw

If you look, you’ll be unable to find a metro system in the US that does not have custom rolling stock. BART has unique requirements, but you’ll see that everywhere you look.

inferiorhuman 4y ago
Most metro systems have more in common with each other than with BART. Nearly everything on BART is one off. For instance Muni has a bunch of small radius 90° turns so they need to have articulated cars with relatively narrow front/rear ends. So yeah that's custom, and a relatively minor inconvenience at service/repair time. Compare that to BART where a power surge damaged thyristors on fifty(!) cars and BART struggled to find replacements. Other metro systems use thyristors, but most other systems run 600–800 VDC. On any other system you could probably source from a variety of vendors or operators. BART runs 1000 VDC and thus needs expensive, unique, hard to find, thyristors. Anyways for a hot moment back in the 30s rail operators standardized on a train design. It's totally doable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCC_streetcar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCC_streetcar