Search

Editor’s note: This love story is written in five parts, in reverse chronological order. The tale begins with a wedding and winds back in time to the couple’s childhoods. Trains – whether of the BART, Pittsburgh Light Rail, or Fairyland Jolly Trolly variety – are essential to each section. Photos courtesy of Katie Weinholt Photography.

I. The BART Wedding  

On May 27, 2023 – seven years and one day after Armin Samii and Marylee Williams met on an East Bay-bound BART train traveling from San Francisco – the couple tied the knot in front of 140 family members and friends at Oakland’s Fairyland. The theme of the wedding was BART.  

As guests streamed into Fairyland on the idyllic spring day, they were greeted by a sign that read, “Welcome aboard!” The sign included a timetable for the evening’s events as well as a photo of Marylee and Armin in BART holiday sweaters, holding their two cats.  

During the ceremony, held in Aesop’s Playhouse, the officiant routinely referenced BART – a central component in the couple’s seven-year-long relationship. The transit system also cropped up in both of their vows.  

“I don’t believe in soulmates, but I do believe in the right people at the right time,” Marylee said when it was her turn to speak. “And Armin, you were exactly the right person on BART to talk to. Accosting someone on a train shouldn’t feel natural, but it did.” 

Armin and Marylee enter the happy hour on the Jolly Trolly. Photos courtesy of Katie Weinholt Photography. 

Following the tying of the knot, Marylee and Armin rode into their happy hour aboard the famed Jolly Trolly.  A hush came over the crowd as the mint green cars chugged into the town square. (If BART is a mass rail system, then the Jolly Trolly is a teensy rail system. The trolly is, however, 18 years BART’s senior). 

At the reception that followed, unique BART touches included escort cards imprinted on BART tickets with guests’ names and assigned “stations,” err tables. A handmade “BART System Map” led guests to the proper stations, which were carefully assigned “based off our guests’ BART vibes,” said Armin.  

The BART ticket escort cards. Photos courtesy of Katie Weinholt Photography. 

Friends they met in Berkeley, for example, sat at the Downtown Berkeley and North Berkeley tables. Visitors from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the couple currently resides, were seated at the Pittsburg/Bay Point table. The SFO and OAK tables hosted family members who traveled from afar.  

“It felt more fun than just a table number,” Marylee said. 

The reception tables each represented a station that was assigned based on the guest’s “BART vibes.” Photos courtesy of Katie Weinholt Photography. 

On the tables, multicolor flowers and pom-poms puffed out of Technicolor vases, which popped against stark white tablecloths. The Fairyland Emerald City Stage, long home to puppet shows and story times, served as the deejay’s platform. To match the vibrant setting of the reception, Marylee quick-changed into a fluffy pink mini dress, paired with black tights and chunky white heels.  

At the afterparty, hosted in the lobby of the wedding hotel (The Moxy in downtown Oakland), the bartender slung cocktails in a blue-and-white bowtie, an homage to BART’s blue-and-white legacy trains.  

Not insignificantly, Armin and Marylee, who are vegan, made the decision to serve solely vegan food at the wedding. The couple said the choice was highly intentional; they wanted to give their friends and family a taste of their day-to-day lives. 

“We wanted to hammer home that our wedding was nontraditional, that we were expressing the values we have as people,” Marylee said.  

Armin added: “It was about having people experience our lives for one night.” (Only a nine-year-old and his younger sister complained. “I learned today I don’t like vegan food,” said the former.) 

To truly give guests a glimpse into their day-to-day lives and core values as a couple, it was essential to Marylee and Armin to frame their wedding around public transportation, especially the system that first introduced them to the joys of transit – BART.  

“We wanted a venue that was easily accessible to our guests, and accessibility to us looks like BART,” Marylee said. “BART was where we had our first taste of not being bound by a car.”  

Armin also noted that they didn’t want guests to have to rent cars; they especially didn’t want anyone driving home drunk.  

“We went back and forth on where to host it,” he said. “Then it was like, why don’t we choose a place near public transit? We didn’t care what city; we just wanted a venue where people could get to easily on transit.”  

Scenes from the Fairyland wedding. Photos courtesy of Katie Weinholt Photography. 

Fittingly, Fairyland is just under a mile from BART’s 19th St/Oakland Station, and if you hop on AC Transit’s NL bus by the station, you can get to the amusement park in about ten minutes. The couple also booked a hotel for their guests that was a ten-minute walk to the venue. 

“We wanted people to experience what our lives are like as people who bike and use transit,” Armin said. “We wanted to give people a taste.”  

That taste included hosting the wedding eve wine night at Press Club near Montgomery St Station in downtown San Francisco. Of the 100 people who showed up, 90 took BART.  

Armin said he and Marylee showed their families at 19th St/Oakland Station how to buy Clipper cards, how to tap in at the fare gates, and how to figure out which train to take and in which direction.  

“A lot of our family had never ridden public transit,” Armin said. “We were really grateful to introduce them to it.”  

II. The T Train Proposal  

In January 2022, after five and a half years of dating and many moves around the U.S., Armin proposed on an aboveground T train in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (their current hometown).  

“We’ve hit a lot of milestones on trains,” Marylee said. 

III. The BART Meet Cute

Armin and Marylee’s paths converged one fateful Thursday evening in 2016. (BART wrote about their meeting in 2021.) 

Armin was heading home from a poker game in the city, and Marylee was leaving an Icelandic film festival. They stumbled upon each other on a Richmond-bound Red Line train heading to the East Bay from San Francisco. Marylee had just barely made the train, and Armin had missed the previous one.  

As the train veered through downtown San Francisco, Marylee decided to ask Armin about the colorful tape on his bike: “Why does it look like that? Do you go to Burning Man?” Accustomed to this question on BART, Armin replied briefly -- “Not yet, maybe next year” -- then put his headphones back in, planning to ignore her the rest of the trip. Marylee was, Armin admitted some seven years after the chance encounter, extremely persistent.  

When the train pulled into Embarcadero Station, Armin watched Marylee get on all fours to pet a “tiny dog” face to face. He became intrigued by the strange woman’s unusual behavior, and, somewhere under the Bay between Embarcadero and West Oakland, the two struck up a proper conversation.  

After a few minutes, they began to discuss radio – Marylee is a radio/audio journalist and producer – including a podcast they both enjoyed, 99% Invisible. The podcast had released a special challenge coin (not unlike the challenge coins used by military personnel) for members, allowing coin bearers to “coin check” others. If the coin-checked did not have the coin on her person, she owed the coin-checker a drink.  

Left: The challenge coins. Right: Armin and Marylee pose with Armin’s colorful bicycle. 

Armin proceeded to coin-check Marylee, who fatefully had left her coin at home. She owed him a beer.  

Just as the coin-checking scenario unfolded, the BART train carrying the two conversationalists pulled into Downtown Berkeley Station – Armin’s stop.  

As he hastily disembarked before the doors closed, Marylee yelled, “How am I supposed to buy you a beer? You don’t even know my name!”  

Armin turned around.  

“What’s your name?” he asked. 

“Marylee Williams!” she shouted as the doors squeezed shut. 

As the train carried onward, Marylee was distressed and regretful -- “Why didn’t I get off the train?” she lamented to herself. As her stop came around – North Berkeley Station – she got off the train and called her grandmother. “I met this guy, I don’t know where he is, and I’ll never see him again,” she groaned. Grandma replied, “Well that’s too bad, but maybe you’ll see him again.”  

Meanwhile, still at Downtown Berkeley Station, Armin began internet-sleuthing for the mysterious Marylee. Nothing came up, so he then decided to race the train to North Berkeley Station – a trip he knew took five minutes on bike, three minutes by train.  

“It’s possible that if she hangs around for three minutes, I might catch her,” he thought. “But it turns out, the trains go faster than I can bike.”  

Alas, when Marylee got home, she checked her Facebook. There was a message waiting from a man named Armin. The two had found each other in cyberspace.  

After three dates in three days – Armin had a trip booked to Sweden, hence the condensed timeline – the two were smitten.  

IV. BART Enters the Picture

When Marylee moved to the Bay Area from Baton Rouge in 2015, she discovered a newfound love in having access to a mass rail transit system.  

“I’ve been a fan of BART for a long time. It’s functional, affordable, and gets me where I need to go,” she said. “When I was getting my master's degree at Berkeley, I think I had my best thoughts and most relaxing times on the train.”  

Marylee admitted the trains could be crowded and frustrating, “but it was easy,” and she liked the communal experience.  

“I’ve always enjoyed the soft swaying of the train as it takes me home,” she added.  

Armin had sold his car not long after moving to Berkeley in 2011. Sold might not be quite the correct term. 

“I actually lent it to a friend because I wasn’t using it – I was biking and taking transit everywhere. It wasn’t until a year later that I realized she still had it,” he said.  

Around that time, Armin was commuting by Amtrak to San Jose from Berkeley. He loved that he could work for the duration of the 90-minute ride.  

“That was probably when I started to realize BART and trains weren’t just a way to get around, but something I had an emotional connection to,” he said.  

Armin also admitted that Marylee wasn’t the first date he met on BART: “Before Marylee, I had met a ton of people on BART, including dates.”  

He continued: “When going on dates in general, I’d always take BART. The date would start and stop at the BART station.” 

V. BBE: Before BART Era  

Armin and Marylee grew up in places lacking substantial public transportation – if the places had it at all. 

Marylee spent her childhood in Mississippi and Louisiana. “I’ve been driving since I was 14-and-a-half,” she said, while Armin grew up in the suburbs of San Diego.  

“Back then, public transit was an adventure for me,” Armin said. “My grandpa would say, ‘Let’s take the bus today!’ And we’d ride it for a loop or two. That was about the extent of my transit use.”  

 The End 

Like something out of the Blade Runner universe, Vallery Lancey’s transit photographs crackle and burn with an undercurrent of energy. You haven’t seen BART like this before, folks.

Lancey, a software engineer based in San Francisco, knows her way around the transit system. The Canadian national is a transit enthusiast – and member of the famed Transit Twitter Besties group. She found herself drawn to photographing BART, a system she takes often to visit friends in the East Bay, because “I really enjoy taking photos of ordinary stuff we take for granted and making people look at it differently.” Lancey said she doesn’t drive and has “always been transit-dependent.”

The photographer is relatively new to the game. A painter in a family of artists, Lancey started making photographs as inspiration for paintings. She became more serious about photography in winter 2020, during lockdown, when she began hiking and snapping pictures of sunrises.

Her photographic progression – from the natural light of the setting sun to the artificial light of a transit station at night – followed naturally. When she found herself on transit, she also found herself taking photographs. Plus, she’s carved a unique niche and style for herself.

“There’s a lot of people in the Bay Area who care about transit,” she said, “but not a lot of people making transit-themed art. So, there’s an appetite for my work.”

Much of the effort comes after the photo is taken, Lancey said. Rather than using gel lights, she extensively edits her photos in post-production, applying a multitude of manipulations (turn down the highlights here, up the vibrancy there).

Some of the settings Lancey uses during the editing process.

“It’s a little hard to boil down,” she admitted. “I think the particular thing I do is I play with clarity, which gives it a smoother or sharper feel.”

She started toying with her images’ clarity to hide the blurriness of a moving train or bus, but she thinks it’s helped her develop her signature style.

“The right combination of lighting and clarity make the photos feel soft in a way that’s very visually appealing and un-photographic,” she said.

BART makes an attractive photography subject, she said, because you can view extensive scenery in “good light” thanks to the trains’ large picture windows. The stations themselves provide for interesting lighting and architectural details, as well. In Lancey’s hands, the text on BART’s digital displays glows and sizzles in red. Especially at night, the stations come alive behind her lens. Her favorite station to photograph is West Oakland, she said, thanks to its beautiful cross-the-bay views of San Francisco.

“I like it when people take away more appreciation for the environment around them,” Lancey said in conclusion. “What really keeps me going from station to station on a Monday evening is I feel like I’m creating art that no one else really is. It’s so satisfying to be able to do that – and keep getting better at it.”

You can view a selection of Lancey’s photographs in the above slideshow. She also regularly posts images to her Twitter, @isthelaststop. 

Michelle Slade (left) and Maria Chappell (right) hard at work scrubbing and power washing the entrance of South Hayward Station during an overnight deep clean. Each BART station is deep cleaned every few months.  

Watch a short video of the cleaning process here.

Maria Chappell, a longtime overnight station cleaner at BART, has a series of photos stored on her phone of a station platform, wedged among images of her kids and grandchildren. The photos show almost nothing but the floor, and intentionally so.  

Chappell snapped the imagery on a recent weeknight after hours of scrubbing, sealing, and waxing the floors with fellow cleaning crew members. If you visit the station in person and look down, you can almost see your face reflected back at you; the flooring truly glitters and gleams after one of these regular, and labor-intensive, deep cleans.  

It’s hard work to make BART’s well-trafficked stations sparkle and shine. Each day, hundreds of people pass through, carrying dirt and grime on the soles of their shoes, along with trash, gum, and dust.  

Maria Chappell power washes the stairs. 

Chappell and her colleagues spend eight hours a night, working from 10pm to 6am, to make sure that riders travel through clean stations when the sun rises each day. They’re the late-night crew that takes care of the deep cleaning of stations – tasks that can’t be done during the day when scores of riders are passing through.  

Every station is cleaned throughout the day when the stations are open to the public. These cleaners handle tasks like picking up waste and mopping and disinfecting, including high-use areas like stairs, escalators, handrails, bathrooms, and Add Fare machines.  

Recently, BART doubled the frequency of overnight station deep cleans. These thorough cleans can take workers one to two weeks to complete, and each station in the system will get one every few months, depending on the station’s needs and busyness. BART also recently doubled the frequency of train car deep cleans. 

Dirt is blasted off stairs with the hot steam power washer, then the water is squeegeed into a nearby drain.  

Cleaners must be detail-oriented while also focusing on the big picture. Overnight cleaners begin their eight-hour shifts at 10pm. At that time, until the station closes around 1am, the cleaners will focus on the concourse and stairs, escalators and elevators, and public restrooms. They surround the work area with orange cones and caution tape to ensure passengers stay safe and out of the way. For safety reasons, platforms are cleaned only when the stations are closed for the night.  

The stairs and floors are always the dirtiest parts of the station, for obvious reasons. But the workers clean the entire station, scrubbing and power washing everything from the stairs and station walls, including metal paneling, to the restrooms. Smaller, more sensitive surfaces are washed and disinfected by spraying a cleaning agent on a rag and scrubbing manually. Bleach is used very minimally, solely for biohazard incidents.  

The shining platform floors at Hayward Station after cleaners scrubbed, sealed, and waxed them. 

The floor cleaning process, however, is the piece de resistance. Below is a snapshot of the procedure, which is used for station entrances, concourses, and platforms: 

1. Floors are dust mopped to capture loose dirt and dust bunnies.  
2. Cleaners run the magnum floor scrubber – a small Zamboni-like machine that’s operated manually – to scrub away socked-in grime and old floor sealant. Sometimes, an alkaline stripper is used to break up seriously caked-in dirt.  
3. Next, it’s time for the steam power washer, which reaches temperatures of 120 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and blasts away grime the magnum scrubber breaks up.  
4. The water from the power washer is squeegeed into drains. The stairs and floors are dried with dry mops.  

The above process is done every few weeks. But every four to six months – one to two months at busy stations – cleaners seal and wax the floors to keep dirt from building up and to make them sparkle. They use mops to carefully layer multiple coats of sealer, which keeps dirt from building up on the floor. Then, they mop multiple layers of wax onto the flooring to make it shine.  

A Foreworker oversees the process, assigning tasks based on priority and ensuring the crews are working to meet BART’s high standards.  

The Foreworker overseeing Chappell’s crew is Wendy Salazar, who started at BART nearly a decade ago as an overnight cleaner herself. The regular crew includes Chappell, Michelle Slade, Lynn Ensminger, and Josh Brown. They refer to themselves as “the Fremont Crew.”  

Foreworker Wendy Salazar is pictured behind a fare gate at South Hayward Station. 

Luis Villatoro, the Assistant Superintendent of System Service (the department that oversees cleaning), said Foreworkers with hands-on experience like Salazar are major assets to their crews.  

“She knows the process, how to get the work done, and how to run the machines,” he said.  

Like many BART employees, Salazar’s path to BART is a story in and of itself. Salazar graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in theater. At the time she applied to BART, she said she was “really just looking for a job that had insurance.”  

But the work and her fellow crew members made a deep impact on her. In the nine years she’s been with BART, she has seen herself mature.  

“I started here at 22,” she said. “I’ve basically grown up at BART.”  

As a cleaner, she said her colleagues gave her a lot of guidance, support, and encouragement. A Foreworker told her early in her career that they could see her as the boss in a few years. 

“And here we are,” she said. 

Sudsy water is power washed away near the Add Fare Machines.  

Salazar said the public might be surprised to learn how many components go into station cleaning and the specialized skills it requires. Cleaners at BART are trained for two-and-a-half weeks in a classroom setting, as well as on the job.  

Salazar said her staff take immense pride in their work.  

“On the overnight shift, you handle the bigger projects, and you get to immediately see the results,” she said. “Cleaners get to say, ‘Hey, I did that!’”  

Or, like Chappell, they snap a photo to remind themselves of their hard work and the gratification of a job well done.  

Live Author Talk with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton and Vanessa Hua

Wednesday, Nov. 1, noon to 1pm at BART Headquarters (2150 Webster Street, Oakland)

Register at this link. 

Members of the public and BART employees are invited to BART Headquarters in Oakland for a live author talk with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of the fall 2023 book club selection, On the Rooftop, moderated by Vanessa Hua, author of the national bestseller Forbidden City: A Novel. The event is free. 

You must sign up to attend in-person. A limited number of seats are available.

Oakland's A Great Good Place for Books will be selling copies of Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's and Vanessa Hua's books. The authors will sign copies of their books after the talk. 

If you can't attend in person, the talk will be livestreamed on Zoom. Click this link at the start of the event to watch. No registration is required for the livestream. 

Click here for more information about One Book One BART. 

At SweaterFest '24 this past weekend, we invited attendees to write wintery poems all about BART, and nearly 100 poets stepped up to pen BART odes that would make the Bard proud (had he stuck around long enough to see the invention of mass rail transit). Reading through the works, we were struck by the profound professions of love for transit, which rivaled Shakespeare's finest romances. BARTy is to the Bay as Juliet is to Romeo. Some of the poems even brought tears to BART employees' eyes! 

Image

The rules were simple: Start each sentence with the specified letters and include mention of a few transit-y words.

We invite you to read some of our favorite poems in the slideshows. Click and hold on a poem to pause the slideshow.

Happy holidays to all and to all a safe ride!

Didn’t make it to SweaterFest? 

There’s still time to buy a sweater, scarf, and beanie (the sweater vests are sold out). Head to Railgoods.com to get your BART holiday swag!