Podcast: Resourceful and determined mechanics keep 50-year-old train cars moving

HOST: Welcome to the official BART podcast, “Hidden Tracks: Stories from BART.” I'm Chris Filippi, your host for this episode and I'm joined by John Allen, who is a Transit Vehicle Mechanic at BART’s Hayward Maintenance Complex. John is BART's answer to MacGyver. In his time at BART, he's become an expert at keeping some of the oldest trains in the entire fleet in operation. We'll learn how he and his fellow mechanics use creativity, reverse engineering, and anything they can lay their hands on the Internet to keep these trains moving. John, thanks so much for joining us.

ALLEN: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

HOST: I think your job title of Transit Vehicle Mechanic doesn't really go far enough in describing the work that you do and what your colleagues do. You literally keep 50-year-old trains up and running. That cannot be a simple task.

ALLEN: No, it's not. Most people don't realize it that the original legacy fleet, what’s referred to as the A car, the slanted nose car, and the car that follows behind that is original. They date back to 1969, that’s where some of the data plates are actually on the cars. So, people don't realize that. They went through a rehab process in the mid-nineties and overhauled, they got rid of a lot of the undercar equipment and went  from DC motors and older air conditioning units to more modern a DOS system on the computer control and all that went in and in the mid-nineties what we refer to as a rehab and we in the shop refer to that as A2-B2. That’s the legacy

HOST: That’s where DOS comes into play in keeping these trades ready and we'll get to that. It's got to be a lot more than simply putting a train car on a lift and looking under the cabin at this point with 50-year-old trains. The first challenge, I would think, is sometimes just finding the parts because they're not produced anymore.

ALLEN: No, they're not. We have searched the Internet and we have called around the world. We have made parts inside the shop. Taking literally pictures of things and reverse engineer with our engineering team to get these pieces to get them back on the trains. We've mixed things. We've gone out to the aviation industry and looked at different things that they had. A perfect example is we were looking for a breaker for our legacy fleet that hadn't been produced in 25 years. And we found one that was close. We got it. We got some pieces out of the aviation world and we did some machining on these breakers to put into our auxiliary power supply equipment underneath the car to get the cars back repaired, to keep them on the tracks to haul our patrons around. So yeah, it's a full-time job keeping them up and going.

HOST: I'm chuckling over your breaker story because it's not like the part just went out a few months ago and oh darn, we just missed it. No, it hasn't been made in 25 years.

ALLEN:  It hasn't been made in 25 years. And then a lot of the things that we get, there's a six-to-eight-month lead time on a short end of things. So, we have to constantly look way into the future to keep parts rolling in. And that's a lot of the components that are underneath the car. Sometimes like on the legacy fleet, were able to buy the auxiliary power supply equipment, we bought I think 70 of them, and we adapted those newer units to put on our legacy fleet to give us an additional ten years because our old ones totally were out. We could not repair them anymore. They had been repaired too many times.

HOST: How important is experience and knowhow and being able to basically plug and play with all these random parts and as you said, even refabricating certain items?

ALLEN: Yeah, it's huge and you have to really think outside the box. You have to take a lot of pride in your work. We have an excellent engineering team that comes down and they have to do the same thing. They have to think outside the box because we just can't go down and get store-bought items. People don't understand that our gauge, our track gauge is wider than most rail systems and most transit systems. So, everything about the cars from the wheels to the axles, because we have what we refer to as in inboard bearings versus outboard bearings is completely different. And experience from the mechanics and the transit vehicle, electrical techs is a is a key here as well as our engineering team.

HOST: You mentioned DOS earlier. I don't think I've thought of DOS since my middle school computer lab. But how does that come into play in keeping these old trains running?

ALLEN: When the cars went through rehab in the nineties, in the later nineties, that was the system that they put in and they put in a diagnostic system in using Windows 95, 98, and some of those older systems. So, when the cars went in for rehab, that was an updated system then that's what the technology was. And we use that. We can run the air conditioning units; we can run the different power supplies underneath the cars. Our techs do that on a day-to-day basis, we can download some things to troubleshoot, what's going on with the car. Of course, now today there's going to be a Windows system in the Fleet of the Future, but that was the state of the technology prior to that.

HOST: So, what does that look like? Do you have laptops running on Windows 98 to make this happen? What do you do?

ALLEN: We plug right into the car. We have those old Hitachi laptops, and we have piles of them and our engineering team literally get piles and piles of computers, rob pieces to keep old laptops going. We use those and we plug into the car just like you would a modern-day system and download the information.

HOST: You talk to your colleagues, I'm sure at other transit agencies, maybe go to conferences and share war stories. Does anybody else do this kind of stuff to keep their trains operating?

ALLEN: There's some pretty old systems. I know for a fact in Chicago, and I think Washington had some pretty old systems, as I know, talking to some vendors that came out from back east a few years ago, they were talking about a switch that we haven't seen since the probably the fifties, and they talked about that. So, there is there is a little bit, but I think even they've moved on.

HOST: Wow. So what is the most extreme direction, number of steps you've had to go to get the right part for a job? To get a train car back in operation?

ALLEN: That would go into our accident repair. BART when it went into existence had the thought process, they actually bought the molds from the manufacturer or the different manufacturers that manufactured the cars back, Alstom and some of those older manufacturers that manufacture these cars originally. So, we had some of the molds for like the panels that are inside the car, the door panels and so on. We had some of the molds so we could recreate those products. Finding the correct resin that hasn't been used in 50 years that became a challenge. We actually had to go out to a lab and have it mixed. We've had to, like I said before, search the Internet, search the world, looking for some of the components and then when that doesn't work, we just simply build it. We had a car, 372 was in a fire in Orinda, I believe in 2013 and there was a lot of under car structure pieces that were destroyed, melted. We did not have them. So we literally went to a another legacy car. We measured it out, we took a long look at it. We did have some drawings but not all and we honestly just got the raw material and manufactured it in our own facility in Hayward, in our machine shop, fabrication shop.

HOST: I would think it's always a challenge to find certain pieces, especially when they're outdated, they're not produced anymore. Has that become more acute because of the global supply chain challenges that we've been hearing about since the pandemic arrived?

ALLEN: Yes, it has, especially on the electronics side. But one thing that's working more in a positive way for us is we're phasing out the legacy fleet and phasing in the Fleet of the Future. Since we're decommissioning cars right now, today we can take those parts and put them in legacy cars that are running today. So that hasn't been as much but yes, we have felt the effects. Things take a lot longer to get in and that slows us way down. It becomes a challenge.

HOST: Certainly, a challenge. And the legacy fleet changes a lot for BART, of course. Yes. I think it's really interesting, though, that before the Fleet of the Future, we had the oldest fleet in the nation, and that was for a long time. And that's one of the reasons you go to these extremes to keep these train cars in operation. And I think a lot of folks don't realize that even today there's a real live possibility that they're getting into a train car that has been in operation since 1972. It's had a lot of work done, but it's been in the district since 1969, you mentioned. I mean at the same year we're launching astronauts to the moon we're getting train cars that are still being used today.

ALLEN: Yes. There's, they've been rehabbed, they've been overhauled I know going back years ago we actually sent one of our A cars out and had it looked at by one of the original manufacturers and they structurally looked at it because a lot of these cars had a time frame and they looked at it and they said okay there's no structural issues and bless the car to run another additional 25 years or whatever it is because a lot of those cars are coming to the end of their service life now.

HOST: What would you say is the greatest challenge? Is it getting those off the wall parts that aren't made anymore, or is it something else?

ALLEN: The greatest challenge is we can't buy a lot of the tooling that we need and we can't buy a lot of the parts that we need. So, we build it, we make it. And that's where myself and my team comes in a place. That would be the hardest part.

HOST: You know, you always hear the comparison between book smarts and street smarts. And it seems like your job is a lot more about street smarts. Like you don't learn this stuff in a textbook. You know, you’ve got to learn from practical experience how this stuff works.

ALLEN: Yes, I'm pretty talented in the art of fabrication, taking raw metal, bending it, welding it together, machining it, and getting it normalized and back on the car in a safe way. That takes a lot of years’ experience. We did go to welding school, we can read blueprints and so on, but it still takes the art of fabrication and fabrication comes just from doing it. You got to have experience. It's one of those things it's experience. You learn from somebody above you and then it passes down through the through the years.

HOST: There's a lot of value in that institutional knowledge isn’t there? Because you're handing that down to the younger guys and then they can bring that to the table themselves.

ALLEN: Yes. Yes.

HOST: Speaking with John Allen, a Transit Vehicle Mechanic here at BART at our Hayward maintenance facility. John, do you ever take a moment to think that again, we have these cars from the seventies, even a little bit before that. These cars have literally covered more than 2 million miles. Do you ever think about like how incredible that is and all the work that's gone into to making that happen?

ALLEN: When you look at it in miles, we look at it in hours and how many preventative maintenance cycles the cars have come in and how many hours the car has on it. And it's hundreds of thousands of hours and when you break that down and you see it, it's amazing. I know that sometimes in the media people go, well the car's broke down but when we look at the numbers and we go, wow, that car went 100,000 hours and it only broke down once in between or whatever that is. We have to pat ourselves on the back because we work hard at keeping them going. We really do. And they have to be safe. We're going at high rates of speed on aerials underneath the water and whatnot so that becomes another issue.

HOST:  Absolutely, and you look at these cars and everybody's looking forward to the Fleet of the Future but these legacy cars, they really have held their own, haven't they? I mean, they've been resilient.

ALLEN: Yes. I personally believe we could rehab the fleet if we wanted to. I know they're old and they would go another 25 years. I, I really believe that because when we look at them, when we look at some of the cars, we have fixed going back ten, 12 years ago, when we look at them today as we decommission them, there's no failures, there's no structural failures there's no cracks, there's no loose hardware, there's no nothing. So, it looks like they could just keep on going. I know we need to replace it. Metal does get fatigued and people want that new and I understand that 100%, but I think they would keep going.

HOST: You take a lot of pride in that, and you've really been involved in some challenging situations in your time here at BART. Sometimes you and your colleagues find ways to salvage cars that most would just leave for dead and throw on the scrap heap. You referenced this earlier back in 2013 a BART train car in Orinda actually caught fire and thankfully nobody was hurt. But it appeared at that time that that train car would be a total loss. But you said no.

ALLEN: I said no. I said no from the beginning. Management and engineering had talked about scrapping the car, it set for a few years and we desperately needed some cars for the Berryessa Line. They broke ground on that. We needed those, we needed to run that car, we needed to run some consists for testing. So, a decision was made to rehab and there was multiple cars, but that one happened to be the pillar, the one that was bad. There was 97 feet of floor that was melted out of that car total that we had to weld. It was melted. There were pieces that were literally gone, we had no idea they were just a pile of molten metal underneath the track when we got to the car in 2013. So, we brought that car in and we literally cut the floor completely out. We had never done that in our operation here at BART. We had never replaced the, our flat nosed cars which we refer to as the C cars in the legacy fleet we had never changed in an extruded aluminum floor. We had no idea what we were doing. We had engineers that have been here since the early seventies. We had newer engineers here. We had same thing with transit vehicle mechanics. Nobody had done that. So, it was our task. I was the lead on that job to figure out how to do it and I worked with an older engineer and we built some tooling. We cut the floor out and we made the new pieces to go into that floor and we literally welded on that car for weeks and fixing the aluminum. I forget how many hundreds of wires that were melted into. We had a brilliant ET named Larry, Electrical Technician named Larry, works out of the Hayward shops and they ring the wires out. What that kind of means is they take voltage meter, and they hook it to the each end of the line and they trace each one out and fix it. He did this to hundreds of wires over the course of several weeks and making long test leads to test lead wires and whatnot. He repaired all the wiring in the car. Basically, the car got completely rewired. Me and my partner, Steve we structurally welded the car back together. We literally would have to take turns because we were doing so much upside-down aluminum welding on the car our necks were going out because it was 97 feet plus we did three passes. We did a route and what we call two tie and pass is to get that in. We painted the cab. We did a floor in the car. We put new seats in it, and every piece of undercar equipment from the truck assemblies which is the wheels in the electric motors to the air conditioning, to all the undercar equipment was all rebuilt by our facility in Hayward. I'm proud to say we took the car out and we do what they call a 100, 300 test that just tested the propulsion system and then we do an automatic train control test on it. Our electrical techs do it. That just verifies that the automatic train control operation works. We took that car out. We did all these tests, everything worked. We sent it over to our test track. And hey, where we have BART actually has its own taste test track over there. We ran it over there for several weeks. It didn't fail. Then we ran it on the Berryessa Line in their testing phase and it never failed. And then we returned it to service, and it ran an additional, I think, seven years. And we decommissioned the car a few months ago.

(Undercarriage of burned Orinda car)

HOST: Going through such an experience like that, were there lessons learned?

ALLEN: Absolutely. First off, it really test your ability to fix one. We did look at the car when we were decommissioning it to see if there was anything that was coming up that was failing. There was nothing. Everything was good. A lot of lessons got learned for building new buildings in the future, accident repair stuff, things we would like to incorporate into a newer facility going forward. We learned that we should maybe not and I had this conversation with one of our high up managers in our Rolling Stocks and Shop of, hey, let's not decommission this and take all the parts off of it so early. Let's look at it because we proved that we could fix this. We have the technology, we have the people, we have the staff, we have the tooling and roll with it. So, that was a big one and we also learned that over the years a lot of people didn't like that style of car. What we refer to in the legacy fleet as a C car. A lot of people didn't like that car. We proved by overhauling the car when it went out and ran that the initial design was really good, and it worked.

(Orinda car post-restoration)

HOST: Has there ever been a car that you've not been able to return to service?

ALLEN: No.

HOST: Wow.

ALLEN: No, not once. Not once. Been close, but no. We had a car, I don’t know if it was 1604, 1605, they were actually couple together, oddly enough in 2011 at a big derail and Concord. I was at the derail and we had to meet our Richmond crew action repair crew fixed one and my crew fixed the other and I don't remember the numbers. The one I think we did 1604 and that car was literally visually twisted when we put it up on stands, we could look down the car and we could see a huge twist in it. We deskinned the car we had, there's a two by four aluminum extrusions that go through the car. We replaced every single one in the car and brought the car back to 100% straight. Returned it to service.

HOST: It really is a blend of science and art, isn't it? And I would think a team effort too, because you look at something like that, like you just described, where it's actually twisted, and people are going to have different ideas and perspectives on that. Talk about that.

ALLEN: The big thing when you're looking at that is you can't make an evaluation when it's together. You have to take it apart and you have to see what the real damage is. That's the key. So that means probably a couple of hundred hours of work to take everything apart to see if you can even think about fixing it. We took it apart and we looked at it and we found that there was just some items on the car that were cracked, bent, and no longer serviceable. We really looked at it and we went if we replace that structure, the car will come back to square and people don't realize this, but the back end of a legacy car where the indoors are, that's all riveted and welded on, we removed that hole unit. It was crushed. We had another one. We put that into place with the new structural pieces and we riveted that and welded that all together. And the car come back to 100% square.

HOST: All these experiences you and your colleagues have had, how did that influence the design of the Fleet of the Future?

ALLEN: That's a good question. I know as we've gone forward and when we first got the legacy fleet in, BART went into business, they had the foresight of getting a lot of parts and accident repair parts and cabs for our legacy fleet and different things like that. And so, when we went, and we started looking at things of the Fleet of the Future. We started asking ourselves as a team engineering, management, and, my accident repair team, we all met and we said, Okay, where is the areas of damage? What happens in a derail? What happens when you hit an object on the tracks? What happens in these different things that we've had over the years and where do we have access for broken windows. The legacy fleet tends to hit some things on the tracks and knocks out the lower right-hand corner. Derails tend to take out air conditioning units and the placement on some of the other car equipment. Our engineering team went and said okay, we need to have better access in these locations and we need to make sure we have the parts to keep the Fleet of the Future going for the next 50 years. And we had a lot of input which was great. We didn't basically say, well, you're an engineer, you're a mechanic, you're a manager. We took everybody's opinion, and everything was wrote down so we could going forward, everybody's opinion was noted, I guess you would say. And a lot of those changes went into the Fleet of the Future.

HOST: How dramatic is the difference working on a legacy train versus working on a fleet of the future car?

ALLEN: There's a lot of differences. They look similar, the exoskeletons, but all the underneath car equipment is completely different. A couplers that couple the trains together, the air conditioning units are completely different. There's nothing that interchanges with them. So it's like learning a whole new system, to be honest with you. So, except for the width of the axles and the wheels themselves, the wheels and what we refer to as the wheels and the rim, there's really nothing that's the same. The gearbox is similar and everything else is different. For the most part.

HOST: I would think with the new trains, you don't have to go on some wild Internet search to find a part.

ALLEN: No we have the parts for those. The challenge with that is we're going into a phase of now we have to build fixtures in workstations to be able to overhaul those units. As I was coming in here, I was answering some emails, work emails related to some coupler stations and things that we were in the process of making in the fabrication shop to be able to overhaul those parts because our crews, our transit vehicle mechanics and our transit vehicle electricians are going through factory training right now it goes to the primary shop and our secondary repair facilities.

HOST: As you know, we have dozens of cars that have been with us for 50 years. But we're also in the midst of this process where all those cars are eventually going to be phased out. We're getting more Fleet of the Future cars into BART at this point, and obviously a lot of our riders are very excited about that. But I got to think that you probably are a little bit nostalgic and might miss those old cars.

ALLEN: I do because I got a ton of knowledge on those older cars. I had a tear in my eye when 372 left because that car was special to me.

HOST: Just to jump in that was the Orinda car.

ALLEN: That was the Orinda car, sorry, the Orinda a car. When that car left, I was really sad. I was hoping that was going to be the last legacy C car to leave because we had put so much effort into fixing it. And I was proud of that car because it just ran. We had no trouble with it. I inspected that car for many years after me and one of our engineers would go down and look at the car, look at all the repair work. So, I missed that and I really wanted that car to stay longer. But yeah,  I really like the legacy fleet. I like that slant nose A car of the legacy fleet. I like all those looks. It's just part of it.

HOST:  Yeah, it's unique. It's that space age design from when BART was launched. I know a lot of our riders get kind of nostalgic for it, too, right?

ALLEN: I was upset that the horns sound different. I mean, BART has that nostalgic horn. Why couldn't we keep that nostalgic beep, beep? But hey, I understand.

HOST: And this is a huge deal for our riders. The work that you and your colleagues do to keep these trains in operation so that we can deliver full service and every train counts, every train car counts when it comes to that but along with that work, you've been involved in other initiatives that impact the rider experience. And one of those is the single seat modification. Tell me how you were involved in that.

ALLEN:  The single seat mod, obviously, the Fleet of the Future was behind for multiple reasons. And we weren't getting the new train cars. And ridership at that time, his was back in around 2016 ridership at that time had peaked. So, we needed to make more room in the car. So, our head engineer at the time, Ben Holland, and I believe the general manager were on a train and they were discussing it and they came up with well, other agencies have single seats so it was kind of born on a literally on a train. That's the story that I was told. And Ben whom I'm good friends with came back and says, hey, could you take one of these old seats and just tell me what you think about making it from holding two people to one-person single seat? So I looked at the seat and it's not as simple as cut it in half, it doesn't work that way. We actually ended up cutting two thirds of the seat and then a third and then welding it together. We had to make what we refer to as fish plates and gussets to make it structurally strong and safe for our riders. And we had no backing. We had no tooling to do this. I made a seat and I put it in a car and I showed it to our upper management. They all liked it. So, they asked me to do six more. So, we did an entire car. And it was kind of funny because we hadn't figured everything out at this point in time. How to fasten things down was this was just a static display. So, we made one seat that was safe to go on the car and then we brought down the general manager, the assistant general manager, and a lot of upper management, and they actually had me speak about it and we talked about it. We ended up doing the single seat and then we did a couple other grab bars and whatnot opening up the center of the car. Then we put it out under a kind of a, an evaluate and process to the public. We did 20 of these single seat cars and 20 of these other cars that had just grab handles where we removed seats. The public survey came back, they liked the single seats, we looked at it. We actually built tooling inside our own fabrication shop. Myself and my partner Steve, we made this tooling. We had no idea what we were doing. We took pictures that engineering had and I was working with one of our great principal engineers, Brian Bentley, and he had pictures of the original testing of the seats so we recreated that. That's where that reverse engineering came into play. We saw pictures of it. We made a fixture, we bolted the seats to it, and we used hydraulic presses. And we basically bent the seats to see how much deflection was in it. We use the same numbers that they would have used for a double seat for a single seat. The seats were actually much stronger. We had no failure. Then at that point, we had to train the crews to do this work because we're now going to do our entire legacy fleet of the B cars and I think one A car. We ended up having to train the crews running 24 hours a day. I ended up doing a major portion of the welding training to get people up and get things certified so we could get those seats. It took one year to do the entire fleet.

HOST: That modification is really popular with our riders.

ALLEN: It was a huge success and when people ask me, that's the easy one when I tell them that was one of the ones that I was majorly involved with because everybody knows that one. Anybody who has ridden BART has been on a car with a single seat and a lot of people like them for a whole list of reasons.

HOST: And that's the result of innovation happening in our shops. That's not like something you could just order off the shelf and install it.

ALLEN: Every seat was done by a Transit Vehicle Mechanic in the fleet. Everyone. That was not sent out to a vendor they weren't new seats, the backs on them, the seat cushions, we modified everything. We built tooling and fixtures to be able to cut them we came up with some different hardware to be able to attach them. That was all literally figured out between our engineering staff and our mechanics.

HOST: That innovation is influencing the Fleet of the Future, right?

ALLEN: Yes. Lessons learned off of that, we put engineering, looked at it and said, okay, we need to be able to change because we've done bike mods and seat mods and different things over the years. So, they put tracks in the new cars in the Fleet of the Future so we can reconfigure the inside of the car much easier. It can come into a shop, mechanics can go to it and reconfigure it. We could do a single seat if we if we wanted to. We could do a double seat, we could remove the seats, we could add more bike space and so on and that was all lessons learned from the single seat line. We learned a lot.

HOST: John you've been at BART for 16 years. What do you like about this job?

ALLEN: Well, it's the challenge of it. Keeping 50 year old cars up and running. There have been times when we have looked at something and I've literally laid awake at night. I know you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to leave work at home, but I've literally laid it home at night in bed, going how am I going to do that? How am I going to fix that? How are we going to get in there and repair this that we can't get? And then to come in the next day and go, Yep, that's how I'm going to do it and do it and have it run and have it go, not fail, not come back. That's job satisfaction.

HOST: I would imagine you take a lot of pride in the fact that you have yet to encounter a car that you could get back into circulation.

ALLEN: Nope, I'm very proud of that fact. That's a that's a big staple for us. It just shows a team effort and we take pride in what we do.

HOST: If there was one thing you would like riders to know about your job, because they don't always think about the stuff behind the scenes and all the work that goes into keeping these cars in operation, what would you want them to know about the work that you and your team do?

ALLEN: I would want them to know that we're just not a bunch of dumb mechanics. We're actually educated, and we take a lot of pride in our work and we're not lazy and that it takes us to keep the fleet going. And if it wasn't for what we do and that goes throughout the system, there wouldn't be a ridership. They wouldn't have us.

HOST: And I feel like one of the things I've learned from talking with you is that there really is a lot of creativity happening in these shops. You know, it's not all just plug and play. You guys have really got to figure things out.

ALLEN: We do, Yeah, and that's the one thing that we do. I don't know if other transit agencies in railroads do this, but we listen to our patrons when they have a survey, we listen to what they're doing and we try to implement those things and we listen to car cleaners and the mechanics and the electrical techs, management engineers, and so on. We listen to everybody, and we try to bring that to the table and come up with a creative effort because there's a lot of times that I had a car cleaner come to me once and he says if we just had this bar shaped like this, we could do X, Y, and Z. We made him that bar and then we made it out of aluminum to make it lighter for his fellow employees, things of that nature. And that's the kind of the cool thing going forward. Some of the things that we would do in the shops would get out to the train operators and so on. There's been a lot of little things over the years like that.

HOST: John Allen, a Transit Vehicle Mechanic with BART. Thank you so much for all the work you and your colleagues do. And of course, for joining us here on Hidden Tracks.

ALLEN: Thank you. It was a pleasure and an honor.

HOST: And thank you for listening to “Hidden Track: Stories from BART.” You can listen to our podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and of course, at our website BART.gov/Podcasts.