15 ms·

How mechanics keep 50-year-old BART trains running: Windows 98, eBay, and scraps

210 points by Stratoscope 4y ago

Stratoscope 4y ago
Just in case... https://archive.ph/4JsZo https://archive.ph/4JsZo
mgraczyk 4y ago
BART is pretty unreliable in part due to maintenance problems, but also due to system design. For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train. https://twitter.com/sfbart/status/1570997016347680768 https://twitter.com/sfbart/status/1570997016347680768 This crash caused the entire system to be disrupted for hours, even very far away from the crash. According to BART, "We don’t have extra tracks to maneuver around problems. That’s why our system comes to a halt from one incident."
- lostdog 4y ago
  "We shared the info [of an early report of someone being on the tracks] and some took to twitter declaring that the person was a junkie on our tracks and it is BART's fault. We hope you have all since deleted your tweets." I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies. I've also always wondered if there was any way to help BART, sort of in a USDS style, or if the problems really are paltry budgets and mismanagement, and so joining in an engineering capacity wouldn't help at all.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    My POV is that it's mostly corruption. They have plenty of money but are set up in service of the employee unions and bosses, not the riders or cities they service. Bart employees make obscene salaries and the system is very protective of their monopoly.
    - andbberger 4y ago
      believe it or not, BART is actually competent and does what they can with the cards they have been dealt. name another US transit agency implementing a takt
      - GauntletWizard 4y ago
        BART discovered conical instead of cylindrical wheels in 2018[1]. This is dawn-of-railroad technology. You can accuse BART of many things, but competency is not one of them. [1] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606 Edit: Clarified what the issue was.
        mlyle 4y ago
        > BART discovered cylindrical wheels in 2018 ?? This is a 2018 piece describing how they moved from cylindrical wheels to an advanced wheel profile. I don't think they're claiming the new, non-cylindrical profile is particularly advanced, either, but just carefully optimized to maintain a single point of contact even as the wheel wears.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        adolph 4y ago
        That doesn’t seem to be a charitable reading and in any case it has to do with wheel taper, more like cone than cylinder. More specifically the nature of the solution was getting two parts of the org, track and train, to work together. While that may seem elementary stuff, anyone at a big org can attest to how often it is tremendously difficult to do sometimes. I write this not as an apologist for commuter rail, which I find excessively expensive and inflexible outside of very circumstances, but as an excuse to link to the lovely Feynman description of why train wheels are tapered: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE
        4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies. I'm not. Linton Johnson was plenty aggressive and aggressively stupid. He got shitcanned because it's a bad look.
- _skel 4y ago
  Caltrain also has limited ability to route around accidents, and in some cases has to run trains the "wrong way" on the other side of the tracks to get past certain areas. They also have no communication at all. Back when I had a Caltrain commute I would use Twitter to find out if there were accidents or delays, because the station signs were alway wrong and almost all of the stations are unstaffed. I would see posts on Twitter from people who were on a train that crashed into a car and the station signs would still say everything was on schedule.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > They also have no communication at all. Their radios are (or were) unencrypted, and you can listen with the radio scanner apps.
  - klinquist 4y ago
    Check out the twitter account / website I run. @bettercaltrain https://caltrain.live https://caltrain.live
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    Caltrain is basically an afterthought. Secondhand rolling stock, tracks shared with freight, and perpetually starved for funding. BART was a green field transit system. BART had every opportunity to design redundancy into the system and didn't. And yet Caltrain actually has dedicated passing tracks while BART doesn't.
- chrisdhoover 4y ago
  BART has grade crossings? Isn’t entirely underground or elevated? Caltrain has grade crossings along its entire length.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    No. BART tracks pass under the street at this point. This motorcyclist managed to fling himself over a prison-style fence while operating on a street with a posted 20 MPH limit.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  IIRC that's also why the hours of BART are so limited. They have to do all their maintenance when the train isn't running since they can't route around it
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train. Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated? But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue. The non-standard rail gauge is also an ongoing issue. Everything has to be custom. Compare this to Caltrain. Several years ago, they wanted to add capacity. They bought off-the-shelf Bombardier cars from an agency in Socal. I'm not sure if they ever even painted them, but they could use them almost immediately.
  - Anechoic 4y ago
    Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated? Yes, but portions run near/under/over/alongside/in the median of roadway traffic. If you read the tweet thread you can see that a driver on the road was ejected into the BART ROW and was hit by a train.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Bart is running India broad guage. While it's isn't a common standard, most off the shelf trains can be ordered with that wheel width. Though they might be stuck with made in America rules that limit their ability to order trains to fit.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    > But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue. Though it's not an absolute panacea, either. The Washington subway has crossovers every two to three stations and is set up for bi-directional operation on one track, and the two things I immediately noticed when I visited Washington eight or so years ago were: - service levels on weekends were already only meh even without construction works - there were construction works on a very small segment of the Red Line between two of those aforementioned crossovers – those works only required closing one track, so they decided to continue running a service on the remaining track. Unfortunately single-tracking severely limits the number of trains you can run, so that tiny closure meant that on that weekend the whole length of the Red Line (all 32 miles of it!) was only operating every 20 minutes or so (originally I had considered an accommodation along the Red Line, luckily I had reconsidered and chosen a different place to stay even before learning about those construction works). After some googling, it seemed that this (i.e. construction works on a tiny stretch of track significantly affecting the service of the whole line even during the daytime, at least at weekends) was not an uncommon occurrence in Washington. While single-tracking might be no problem late at night (when a reduced frequency doesn't matter that much, and might not be even all that much reduced as compared to normal service levels at that time of the day), or during unplanned short-term disruptions, for that kind of scheduled-in-advance all-day construction works I'd say it's at least debatable whether a complete closure of the affected stretch of track (with a bus replacement service) and a full service on the whole rest of the line might not be a better compromise…
lawrenceyan 4y ago
BART is the ailing infrastructure / life support before self-driving cars come online, and that should be immensely respected. We should always remember where we came from.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  Autonomous vehicles are not a replacement for intra-regional transport systems like BART, they're complementary last-mile transport competing against things like taxis. The relative costs make the difference obvious. A one way BART ticket between two distant stops like Dublin and 16th st/Mission is currently $3.45. Using a conservative cost-per-mile figure of $0.50 for the car and ignoring the bridge toll, the 37 road miles between those stations would cost over 5x more than the BART fare. An expensive autonomous vehicle that has to recoup R&D and generally be profitable would probably have to be an order of magnitude or more expensive than BART.
  - lawrenceyan 4y ago
    Given the costs for development of roads has already been paid for, self-driving cars are actually incredibly cheap. It’s the cost of electricity plus amortized depreciation of the vehicle. R&D is pretty even I think when you consider the development costs that also went into engineering the BART system. The cost per mile is definitely within the range of ~.09 ($3.45 / 37 miles), with immense value from being able to travel anywhere that has roads and been geo-mapped. One of the primary limitations of public transport is that it’s limited to specific locations. Self-driving removes that constraint.
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      $0.09 is more like the cost of energy than the total cost including depreciation. The federal $0.50 rate is much closer to the actual targets companies are aiming for.
      - lawrenceyan 4y ago
sys_64738 4y ago
I've not been on BART for 25 years and it felt antiquated back then.
tinus_hn 4y ago
At least this system cannot be exploited, there is no security to begin with!
marcodiego 4y ago
The screenshot makes it look like they are running something in DOS. So, maybe they can upgrade to FreeDOS?
- oneplane 4y ago
  If they depend on direct hardware access, there are other operating systems that can do that. And if they can do multi-tasking, they can switch to pretty much any other operating system. But in this case I bet it's a combination of them not actually having any option other than to comply with the requirements of some old piece of software that is outside of their control. If they were to demand that all software used in those systems were delivered with sources and compilers, they could at least maintain it and port to newer operating systems and hardware. But they don't.
metadat 4y ago
Archive links (ranked by VPN friendliness): 1.) https://web.archive.org/web/20220917191344/https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-keep-50-year-old-bart-trains-running-windows-98-ebay-and-scraps/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220917191344/https://www.mercu... 2.) https://archive.ph/4JsZo https://archive.ph/4JsZo
oneplane 4y ago
It's almost like the people in charge aren't really affected by it, and therefore don't really want to put any focus and effort (money, time, attention) in to making it a bit more reliable and attractive.
- planetsprite 4y ago
  As is the case for 90% of public services in the United States.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    And in any company
    - badpun 4y ago
      In companies, the feedback loop is shorter. If the company's products or services are disappointing, the sales will fall (unless the company happens to be monopoly, but that's a different point), which will immediately be noticed by the CEO, who will start some mitigating actions that is likely to put some pressure on the workers. Whereas, if people are unhappy with a public service, they can do... what exactly? Swap Republicans for Democrats (or the other way around, depending on who's in power right now) in the next election? How likely is that to accomplish anything?
- clintonb 4y ago
  What are you talking about? The "Fleet of the Future" (or Deloreans, as I call them) now comprises a third of the cars in operation. The older cars (space shuttles) are being phased out.
jschveibinz 4y ago
There is gold in specializing in 40+ year old technology and programming environments for some lucky consultants.
jalk 4y ago
There is something wrong with the description of the laptop use (besides calling DOS a language) - on one hand they are running windows 10 with Win98 virtualized. Then they mention Thinkpads circa 2000. I'm pretty sure Win10 won't run on those machines, so I guess the old laptops are for the interface to the train computers - RS-232 is my guess (could be the parallel port). If all they are using the DOS software for is to dump a log from the train, then it sound to me, that sniffing the protocol would be fairly simple. Calling people from bay-area hacker spaces to give them a hand in creating something more modern.
- RajT88 4y ago
  Would agree with all of this. The problem is that BART doesn't employ talented reverse engineers. There is now way they could afford them in that area. Also: Talented reverse engineers are hard to find on a good day in any given area. I used to think that my mentors from the start of my tech career were just the baseline level of sophistication you'd expect of any decent software engineer. 20 years later I have seen how few people have the mindset to get into that sort of thing. (And it is a mindset much more than a level of intellect, IMO)
  - mh- 4y ago
    I don't ride Bart anymore, but plenty of us would have done this work for free.. just to see a small chance at improving the system. The dysfunction is broader than them being unable to afford engineering talent.
    - parker_mountain 4y ago
      > plenty of us would have done this work for free This is the interface to the train control system - a primary safety system - responsible for the lives of literally a million people on an average month. Are you prepared to spend months of your lives rigorously testing and phasing this system in? Are you prepared for the intense legal liability if something goes wrong?
      - 4y ago
Aloha 4y ago
In fairness, they're in the midst of a major fleet replacement which will theoretically be done by next year.
- V-eHGsd_ 4y ago
  i expect a bart bond measure in basically every cycle.
- dang 4y ago
  I hope so. The difference between the old cars and the new ones is striking enough that I've noticed myself holding my breath waiting to see which I'm about to get in. I fear it won't take long for the new ones to degenerate, though; I've even noticed some signs of that already.
  - clintonb 4y ago
    The announcer tells you which you're riding in when they announce arrivals. 3-door = new car 2-door = old car
    - dang 4y ago
      I didn't know that - thanks!
dehrmann 4y ago
Since I guess it's a DOS program, I wonder if FreeDOS would work out-of-the-box on modern hardware?
- tyingq 4y ago
  The article mentions they don't need DOS anymore, so they seem to be past that particular problem. It could have been as simple as something like FreeDOS on modern hardware didn't work because it was written to use a real serial port and not something like a USB to serial adapter. And perhaps until recently, they didn't have anyone to help figure out how to bridge something like that through an emulator or vm passthrough device, etc.
carlivar 4y ago
I'm surprised the article didn't mention that BART is the only train in North America on the uncommon 5'6" gauge. This is another factor making parts and equipment more difficult to source.
- djbusby 4y ago
  It also makes the trains stable; wide stance.
  - carlivar 4y ago
    Was it necessary to do that? A stability problem elsewhere?
    - fuckstick 4y ago
      https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2 High winds, lighter cars.
    - potatochup 4y ago
      It was originally designed that way to cope with high winds across the Golden Gate Bridge (even though those plans got scrapped)
      - clayhacks 4y ago
        Damn we should bring those back and put the wide gauage to use! BARTing into marin and beyond would be amazing
        runarberg 4y ago
        You can take a ferry and then SMART all the way to San Bruno (I think they are planning an extension to Cloverdale, and eventually to Fort Ross). Personally I would rather want faster muni buses to the Avenues (or even the Persido) over BART to Marin, although People living there might disagree.
fibonacc 4y ago
Its puzzling how the world's richest country spends more than a country like South Korea on public transit and still stuck using Windows 98 and other ancient antics. For instance the Seoul Metro yearly budget is 10x less than New York's yet it runs far longer and more efficient. It's also safer.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Construction costs (for buildings or tunnels) in NYC are also many times higher than anyplace else in the world, largely due to corruption.
  - ParksNet 4y ago
    Also vast demographic differences in the subway riders.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MAGZine 4y ago
when something needs to run day-in and day-out every day, it is difficult to justify swapping things just because they're old. as it turns out, old things have stood the test of time and generally work quite well. vancouver bc upgraded its own train control systems a handful of years ago. unsurprising to anyone who has tried to do a migration, there were service incidents. trains stuck in the middle of nowhere sort of thing. It's all done, upgraded, and modernized yet. But there is a growing pain and growing cost. The tricky thing to know is when the juice is worth the squeeze.
- quake 4y ago
  Not to mention the amount of similarities between SkyTrain and BART with the automated system and custom parts. It didn't even strike me as odd that the trains didn't have drivers until a dump of snow hit the rails and someone had to open the front compartment of the train to access the manual controls to drive it into Columbia Station (why is it always Columbia?)
jbverschoor 4y ago
Reads like any “software company” with ancient management that doesn’t believe technical sect is actually a thing
LatteLazy 4y ago
Just to be "that guy" for a minute... Windows 98? The DLR (Docklands Light Railway) still uses computers from the 80s for their self driving and signalling systems. They have a room full of them and when the last one dies, that's it. London Underground were at one point the worlds largest manufacturer of vacuum tubes for their signal systems (can't buy them, I guess we have to build them) Train systems are one of the ultimate examples of people not thinking long term, complex systems and infrastructure that cannot be closed even for a few days. So you often get these weird special cases.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  If the DLR has a room full of spare computers, doesn't that show they are thinking long-term? Stockpiling £50,000 of computers might well be cheaper and lower-risk than upgrading a signalling system.
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    True, but once those machines are gone, they're fucked. Plus anyone having issues with Win98 is doing a lot worse than DLR. Real long term thinking would be a modular signalling system where you could reliably replace one section in (say) 48h, so you could close for a weekend and reliably re-open with whatever tech we will be using in 2070 in place. I might be a bit jaded on this. I spent about 8 years nursing these systems to keep them working because there was no way we could close a TfL line for 3 months and completely change the signalling system and make it faster, safer, more reliable, self driving etc. Even having moved to finance, I am routinely delayed on the way to work when the (new) CrossRail signalling system conflicts with the (old) system on the same line for different trains. C'est la vie I guess, I understand discounting so basically anything that takes 40 years to be useful is NOT worth doing...
- DIARRHEA_xd 4y ago
  Not sure if this is still true after SelTrac upgrades
nspattak 4y ago
If only there have been a more appropriate idea to avoid proprietary software and protocols. Oh wait, there is free software/open source! it is really astonishing how people are still willing to be locked-in and go to extreme lengths to continue to be locked-in.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  Such is the case when government projects are built on the idea of 'the lowest bidder' making a quick buck.
rayiner 4y ago
The decline of BART and Metro is a good metaphor for the decline of American government competence. The 1970s saw a wave of state of the art automated train systems built in SF, DC, and ATL. When we moved to DC in 1989 the Metro offered a smooth, comfortable, computer-controlled ride. Today those systems are in shambles. The automatic train control infrastructure in the DC metro has deteriorated so much that it was turned off in 2009. Today a DC Metro ride is uncivilized, like the ancient system in NYC, with some poorly trained driver jerking you to a stop at each platform. Not only that, but the 6 minute headways built into the original system were relaxed to 8 minutes, and even that is not achieved in practice.
- LeafItAlone 4y ago
  > Today a DC Metro ride is uncivilized This is quite the exaggeration. I use the DC metro multiple times a week (but no longer daily). I also prefer to use public transit while traveling. The ride is similar to elsewhere in the US and about 50% of abroad systems.
  - setgree 4y ago
    In my experience, if you ride trains in Singapore or Tokyo and then visit the US, the word ‘uncivilized’ really does come to mind.
    - inferiorhuman 4y ago
      https://www.safeyglobal.com/singapores-mtr-transit-system-breakdowns https://www.safeyglobal.com/singapores-mtr-transit-system-br... https://www.asiaone.com/singapore/woman-pees-mrt-train-water-nearly-reaches-fellow-passengers-shoes https://www.asiaone.com/singapore/woman-pees-mrt-train-water... https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/joo-koon-train-collision-some-passengers-cried-and-there-was-vomit-in-the-train-says https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/joo-koon-train-collis... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishan_tunnel_flooding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishan_tunnel_flooding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasir_Ris_rail_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasir_Ris_rail_accident
max_entropy 4y ago
Barely Adequate Rail Transit
zhala 4y ago
As someone who did IT at a public transit agency for a medium sized city briefly, this is all pretty accurate and similar at most public transit agencies. Even brand new busses are still using old hardware under the hood that requires special deutsch to serial cables that require windows 7 machines to interface. Likewise all the software that runs transit agencies is extremely dated and heavy.
catdoggg 4y ago
Here's an image of the interface https://twitter.com/eli_kamisher/status/1571189915035258881?s=20&t=KZGMHsDLntVw1Z7QZoH6xQ https://twitter.com/eli_kamisher/status/1571189915035258881?...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tibbydudeza 4y ago
Reminds me of the McLaren F1 sports car - a bespoke once off run V12 BMW engine so it uses a custom McLaren developed PCMCIA adapter as the main diagnostic interface. Interface and software only works with a Compaq LTE 5280.

210 points by Stratoscope 4y ago

Just in case... https://archive.ph/4JsZo https://archive.ph/4JsZo

BART is pretty unreliable in part due to maintenance problems, but also due to system design. For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train. https://twitter.com/sfbart/status/1570997016347680768 https://twitter.com/sfbart/status/1570997016347680768 This crash caused the entire system to be disrupted for hours, even very far away from the crash. According to BART, "We don’t have extra tracks to maneuver around problems. That’s why our system comes to a halt from one incident."

lostdog 4y ago
"We shared the info [of an early report of someone being on the tracks] and some took to twitter declaring that the person was a junkie on our tracks and it is BART's fault. We hope you have all since deleted your tweets." I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies. I've also always wondered if there was any way to help BART, sort of in a USDS style, or if the problems really are paltry budgets and mismanagement, and so joining in an engineering capacity wouldn't help at all.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  My POV is that it's mostly corruption. They have plenty of money but are set up in service of the employee unions and bosses, not the riders or cities they service. Bart employees make obscene salaries and the system is very protective of their monopoly.
  - andbberger 4y ago
    believe it or not, BART is actually competent and does what they can with the cards they have been dealt. name another US transit agency implementing a takt
    - GauntletWizard 4y ago
      BART discovered conical instead of cylindrical wheels in 2018[1]. This is dawn-of-railroad technology. You can accuse BART of many things, but competency is not one of them. [1] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606 Edit: Clarified what the issue was.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        > BART discovered cylindrical wheels in 2018 ?? This is a 2018 piece describing how they moved from cylindrical wheels to an advanced wheel profile. I don't think they're claiming the new, non-cylindrical profile is particularly advanced, either, but just carefully optimized to maintain a single point of contact even as the wheel wears.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - adolph 4y ago
        That doesn’t seem to be a charitable reading and in any case it has to do with wheel taper, more like cone than cylinder. More specifically the nature of the solution was getting two parts of the org, track and train, to work together. While that may seem elementary stuff, anyone at a big org can attest to how often it is tremendously difficult to do sometimes. I write this not as an apologist for commuter rail, which I find excessively expensive and inflexible outside of very circumstances, but as an excuse to link to the lovely Feynman description of why train wheels are tapered: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE
        4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies. I'm not. Linton Johnson was plenty aggressive and aggressively stupid. He got shitcanned because it's a bad look.
_skel 4y ago
Caltrain also has limited ability to route around accidents, and in some cases has to run trains the "wrong way" on the other side of the tracks to get past certain areas. They also have no communication at all. Back when I had a Caltrain commute I would use Twitter to find out if there were accidents or delays, because the station signs were alway wrong and almost all of the stations are unstaffed. I would see posts on Twitter from people who were on a train that crashed into a car and the station signs would still say everything was on schedule.
- toast0 4y ago
  > They also have no communication at all. Their radios are (or were) unencrypted, and you can listen with the radio scanner apps.
- klinquist 4y ago
  Check out the twitter account / website I run. @bettercaltrain https://caltrain.live https://caltrain.live
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  Caltrain is basically an afterthought. Secondhand rolling stock, tracks shared with freight, and perpetually starved for funding. BART was a green field transit system. BART had every opportunity to design redundancy into the system and didn't. And yet Caltrain actually has dedicated passing tracks while BART doesn't.
chrisdhoover 4y ago
BART has grade crossings? Isn’t entirely underground or elevated? Caltrain has grade crossings along its entire length.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  No. BART tracks pass under the street at this point. This motorcyclist managed to fling himself over a prison-style fence while operating on a street with a posted 20 MPH limit.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
IIRC that's also why the hours of BART are so limited. They have to do all their maintenance when the train isn't running since they can't route around it
dehrmann 4y ago
> For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train. Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated? But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue. The non-standard rail gauge is also an ongoing issue. Everything has to be custom. Compare this to Caltrain. Several years ago, they wanted to add capacity. They bought off-the-shelf Bombardier cars from an agency in Socal. I'm not sure if they ever even painted them, but they could use them almost immediately.
- Anechoic 4y ago
  Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated? Yes, but portions run near/under/over/alongside/in the median of roadway traffic. If you read the tweet thread you can see that a driver on the road was ejected into the BART ROW and was hit by a train.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Bart is running India broad guage. While it's isn't a common standard, most off the shelf trains can be ordered with that wheel width. Though they might be stuck with made in America rules that limit their ability to order trains to fit.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  > But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue. Though it's not an absolute panacea, either. The Washington subway has crossovers every two to three stations and is set up for bi-directional operation on one track, and the two things I immediately noticed when I visited Washington eight or so years ago were: - service levels on weekends were already only meh even without construction works - there were construction works on a very small segment of the Red Line between two of those aforementioned crossovers – those works only required closing one track, so they decided to continue running a service on the remaining track. Unfortunately single-tracking severely limits the number of trains you can run, so that tiny closure meant that on that weekend the whole length of the Red Line (all 32 miles of it!) was only operating every 20 minutes or so (originally I had considered an accommodation along the Red Line, luckily I had reconsidered and chosen a different place to stay even before learning about those construction works). After some googling, it seemed that this (i.e. construction works on a tiny stretch of track significantly affecting the service of the whole line even during the daytime, at least at weekends) was not an uncommon occurrence in Washington. While single-tracking might be no problem late at night (when a reduced frequency doesn't matter that much, and might not be even all that much reduced as compared to normal service levels at that time of the day), or during unplanned short-term disruptions, for that kind of scheduled-in-advance all-day construction works I'd say it's at least debatable whether a complete closure of the affected stretch of track (with a bus replacement service) and a full service on the whole rest of the line might not be a better compromise…

lawrenceyan 4y ago

BART is the ailing infrastructure / life support before self-driving cars come online, and that should be immensely respected. We should always remember where we came from.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
Autonomous vehicles are not a replacement for intra-regional transport systems like BART, they're complementary last-mile transport competing against things like taxis. The relative costs make the difference obvious. A one way BART ticket between two distant stops like Dublin and 16th st/Mission is currently $3.45. Using a conservative cost-per-mile figure of $0.50 for the car and ignoring the bridge toll, the 37 road miles between those stations would cost over 5x more than the BART fare. An expensive autonomous vehicle that has to recoup R&D and generally be profitable would probably have to be an order of magnitude or more expensive than BART.
- lawrenceyan 4y ago
  Given the costs for development of roads has already been paid for, self-driving cars are actually incredibly cheap. It’s the cost of electricity plus amortized depreciation of the vehicle. R&D is pretty even I think when you consider the development costs that also went into engineering the BART system. The cost per mile is definitely within the range of ~.09 ($3.45 / 37 miles), with immense value from being able to travel anywhere that has roads and been geo-mapped. One of the primary limitations of public transport is that it’s limited to specific locations. Self-driving removes that constraint.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    $0.09 is more like the cost of energy than the total cost including depreciation. The federal $0.50 rate is much closer to the actual targets companies are aiming for.
    - lawrenceyan 4y ago

sys_64738 4y ago

I've not been on BART for 25 years and it felt antiquated back then.

tinus_hn 4y ago

At least this system cannot be exploited, there is no security to begin with!

marcodiego 4y ago

The screenshot makes it look like they are running something in DOS. So, maybe they can upgrade to FreeDOS?

oneplane 4y ago
If they depend on direct hardware access, there are other operating systems that can do that. And if they can do multi-tasking, they can switch to pretty much any other operating system. But in this case I bet it's a combination of them not actually having any option other than to comply with the requirements of some old piece of software that is outside of their control. If they were to demand that all software used in those systems were delivered with sources and compilers, they could at least maintain it and port to newer operating systems and hardware. But they don't.

metadat 4y ago

Archive links (ranked by VPN friendliness): 1.) https://web.archive.org/web/20220917191344/https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-keep-50-year-old-bart-trains-running-windows-98-ebay-and-scraps/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220917191344/https://www.mercu... 2.) https://archive.ph/4JsZo https://archive.ph/4JsZo

oneplane 4y ago

It's almost like the people in charge aren't really affected by it, and therefore don't really want to put any focus and effort (money, time, attention) in to making it a bit more reliable and attractive.

planetsprite 4y ago
As is the case for 90% of public services in the United States.
- hulitu 4y ago
  And in any company
  - badpun 4y ago
    In companies, the feedback loop is shorter. If the company's products or services are disappointing, the sales will fall (unless the company happens to be monopoly, but that's a different point), which will immediately be noticed by the CEO, who will start some mitigating actions that is likely to put some pressure on the workers. Whereas, if people are unhappy with a public service, they can do... what exactly? Swap Republicans for Democrats (or the other way around, depending on who's in power right now) in the next election? How likely is that to accomplish anything?
clintonb 4y ago
What are you talking about? The "Fleet of the Future" (or Deloreans, as I call them) now comprises a third of the cars in operation. The older cars (space shuttles) are being phased out.

jschveibinz 4y ago

There is gold in specializing in 40+ year old technology and programming environments for some lucky consultants.

jalk 4y ago

There is something wrong with the description of the laptop use (besides calling DOS a language) - on one hand they are running windows 10 with Win98 virtualized. Then they mention Thinkpads circa 2000. I'm pretty sure Win10 won't run on those machines, so I guess the old laptops are for the interface to the train computers - RS-232 is my guess (could be the parallel port). If all they are using the DOS software for is to dump a log from the train, then it sound to me, that sniffing the protocol would be fairly simple. Calling people from bay-area hacker spaces to give them a hand in creating something more modern.

RajT88 4y ago
Would agree with all of this. The problem is that BART doesn't employ talented reverse engineers. There is now way they could afford them in that area. Also: Talented reverse engineers are hard to find on a good day in any given area. I used to think that my mentors from the start of my tech career were just the baseline level of sophistication you'd expect of any decent software engineer. 20 years later I have seen how few people have the mindset to get into that sort of thing. (And it is a mindset much more than a level of intellect, IMO)
- mh- 4y ago
  I don't ride Bart anymore, but plenty of us would have done this work for free.. just to see a small chance at improving the system. The dysfunction is broader than them being unable to afford engineering talent.
  - parker_mountain 4y ago
    > plenty of us would have done this work for free This is the interface to the train control system - a primary safety system - responsible for the lives of literally a million people on an average month. Are you prepared to spend months of your lives rigorously testing and phasing this system in? Are you prepared for the intense legal liability if something goes wrong?
    - 4y ago

Aloha 4y ago

In fairness, they're in the midst of a major fleet replacement which will theoretically be done by next year.

V-eHGsd_ 4y ago
i expect a bart bond measure in basically every cycle.
dang 4y ago
I hope so. The difference between the old cars and the new ones is striking enough that I've noticed myself holding my breath waiting to see which I'm about to get in. I fear it won't take long for the new ones to degenerate, though; I've even noticed some signs of that already.
- clintonb 4y ago
  The announcer tells you which you're riding in when they announce arrivals. 3-door = new car 2-door = old car
  - dang 4y ago
    I didn't know that - thanks!

dehrmann 4y ago

Since I guess it's a DOS program, I wonder if FreeDOS would work out-of-the-box on modern hardware?

tyingq 4y ago
The article mentions they don't need DOS anymore, so they seem to be past that particular problem. It could have been as simple as something like FreeDOS on modern hardware didn't work because it was written to use a real serial port and not something like a USB to serial adapter. And perhaps until recently, they didn't have anyone to help figure out how to bridge something like that through an emulator or vm passthrough device, etc.

carlivar 4y ago

I'm surprised the article didn't mention that BART is the only train in North America on the uncommon 5'6" gauge. This is another factor making parts and equipment more difficult to source.

djbusby 4y ago
It also makes the trains stable; wide stance.
- carlivar 4y ago
  Was it necessary to do that? A stability problem elsewhere?
  - fuckstick 4y ago
    https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2 High winds, lighter cars.
  - potatochup 4y ago
    It was originally designed that way to cope with high winds across the Golden Gate Bridge (even though those plans got scrapped)
    - clayhacks 4y ago
      Damn we should bring those back and put the wide gauage to use! BARTing into marin and beyond would be amazing
      - runarberg 4y ago
        You can take a ferry and then SMART all the way to San Bruno (I think they are planning an extension to Cloverdale, and eventually to Fort Ross). Personally I would rather want faster muni buses to the Avenues (or even the Persido) over BART to Marin, although People living there might disagree.

fibonacc 4y ago

Its puzzling how the world's richest country spends more than a country like South Korea on public transit and still stuck using Windows 98 and other ancient antics. For instance the Seoul Metro yearly budget is 10x less than New York's yet it runs far longer and more efficient. It's also safer.

midoridensha 4y ago
Construction costs (for buildings or tunnels) in NYC are also many times higher than anyplace else in the world, largely due to corruption.
- ParksNet 4y ago
  Also vast demographic differences in the subway riders.

deleted 4y ago

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MAGZine 4y ago

when something needs to run day-in and day-out every day, it is difficult to justify swapping things just because they're old. as it turns out, old things have stood the test of time and generally work quite well. vancouver bc upgraded its own train control systems a handful of years ago. unsurprising to anyone who has tried to do a migration, there were service incidents. trains stuck in the middle of nowhere sort of thing. It's all done, upgraded, and modernized yet. But there is a growing pain and growing cost. The tricky thing to know is when the juice is worth the squeeze.

quake 4y ago
Not to mention the amount of similarities between SkyTrain and BART with the automated system and custom parts. It didn't even strike me as odd that the trains didn't have drivers until a dump of snow hit the rails and someone had to open the front compartment of the train to access the manual controls to drive it into Columbia Station (why is it always Columbia?)

jbverschoor 4y ago

Reads like any “software company” with ancient management that doesn’t believe technical sect is actually a thing

LatteLazy 4y ago

Just to be "that guy" for a minute... Windows 98? The DLR (Docklands Light Railway) still uses computers from the 80s for their self driving and signalling systems. They have a room full of them and when the last one dies, that's it. London Underground were at one point the worlds largest manufacturer of vacuum tubes for their signal systems (can't buy them, I guess we have to build them) Train systems are one of the ultimate examples of people not thinking long term, complex systems and infrastructure that cannot be closed even for a few days. So you often get these weird special cases.

Symbiote 4y ago
If the DLR has a room full of spare computers, doesn't that show they are thinking long-term? Stockpiling £50,000 of computers might well be cheaper and lower-risk than upgrading a signalling system.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  True, but once those machines are gone, they're fucked. Plus anyone having issues with Win98 is doing a lot worse than DLR. Real long term thinking would be a modular signalling system where you could reliably replace one section in (say) 48h, so you could close for a weekend and reliably re-open with whatever tech we will be using in 2070 in place. I might be a bit jaded on this. I spent about 8 years nursing these systems to keep them working because there was no way we could close a TfL line for 3 months and completely change the signalling system and make it faster, safer, more reliable, self driving etc. Even having moved to finance, I am routinely delayed on the way to work when the (new) CrossRail signalling system conflicts with the (old) system on the same line for different trains. C'est la vie I guess, I understand discounting so basically anything that takes 40 years to be useful is NOT worth doing...
DIARRHEA_xd 4y ago
Not sure if this is still true after SelTrac upgrades

nspattak 4y ago

If only there have been a more appropriate idea to avoid proprietary software and protocols. Oh wait, there is free software/open source! it is really astonishing how people are still willing to be locked-in and go to extreme lengths to continue to be locked-in.

wildrhythms 4y ago
Such is the case when government projects are built on the idea of 'the lowest bidder' making a quick buck.

rayiner 4y ago

The decline of BART and Metro is a good metaphor for the decline of American government competence. The 1970s saw a wave of state of the art automated train systems built in SF, DC, and ATL. When we moved to DC in 1989 the Metro offered a smooth, comfortable, computer-controlled ride. Today those systems are in shambles. The automatic train control infrastructure in the DC metro has deteriorated so much that it was turned off in 2009. Today a DC Metro ride is uncivilized, like the ancient system in NYC, with some poorly trained driver jerking you to a stop at each platform. Not only that, but the 6 minute headways built into the original system were relaxed to 8 minutes, and even that is not achieved in practice.

LeafItAlone 4y ago
> Today a DC Metro ride is uncivilized This is quite the exaggeration. I use the DC metro multiple times a week (but no longer daily). I also prefer to use public transit while traveling. The ride is similar to elsewhere in the US and about 50% of abroad systems.
- setgree 4y ago
  In my experience, if you ride trains in Singapore or Tokyo and then visit the US, the word ‘uncivilized’ really does come to mind.
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    https://www.safeyglobal.com/singapores-mtr-transit-system-breakdowns https://www.safeyglobal.com/singapores-mtr-transit-system-br... https://www.asiaone.com/singapore/woman-pees-mrt-train-water-nearly-reaches-fellow-passengers-shoes https://www.asiaone.com/singapore/woman-pees-mrt-train-water... https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/joo-koon-train-collision-some-passengers-cried-and-there-was-vomit-in-the-train-says https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/joo-koon-train-collis... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishan_tunnel_flooding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishan_tunnel_flooding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasir_Ris_rail_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasir_Ris_rail_accident

max_entropy 4y ago

Barely Adequate Rail Transit

zhala 4y ago

As someone who did IT at a public transit agency for a medium sized city briefly, this is all pretty accurate and similar at most public transit agencies. Even brand new busses are still using old hardware under the hood that requires special deutsch to serial cables that require windows 7 machines to interface. Likewise all the software that runs transit agencies is extremely dated and heavy.

catdoggg 4y ago

Here's an image of the interface https://twitter.com/eli_kamisher/status/1571189915035258881?s=20&t=KZGMHsDLntVw1Z7QZoH6xQ https://twitter.com/eli_kamisher/status/1571189915035258881?...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tibbydudeza 4y ago

Reminds me of the McLaren F1 sports car - a bespoke once off run V12 BMW engine so it uses a custom McLaren developed PCMCIA adapter as the main diagnostic interface. Interface and software only works with a Compaq LTE 5280.