Curious if any subway car designs are in multiple city subway systems or is each system truly custom designed? It appears that Baltimore and Miami appear to have similar car designs.
Anyone else? Perhapse Washington D.C. and Atlanta?
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Interesting question. One that comes to mind is Boston's first picture-window rapid transit car that appeared on the East Boston Tunnel (now Blue) Line in the early 1950s. It led directly to Cleveland's new rapid transit cars a few years after and certainly influenced the design of the new air-conditioned Hudson Tube cars even later. All were made by St. Louis Car Company. An argument could also be made for the Chicago PCC el cars that preceded all of them, again all made by St. Louis Car.
Cleveland's introduction of the very long Airporter cars in the late 1960s might have inspired subsequent longer designs, but who knows?
On the light rail side, however, quite a different story obviously- from the PCCs of the 1930s/40s/50s to the Siemens-Duwag cars of the 1980s and 90s. "Dare to be similar" was clearly the philosophy, although UMTA did force a joint LRV procurement from Boeing for Boston and San Francisco.
Aren't the original BART cars and the DC Metro cars very similar but for the noses?
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Interesting question. Some systems need their own custom designs. New York City has two different subway systems with incompatible equipment because they were originally built to totally different loading gauges. The London Underground has a similar situation. It would certainly make sense if new transit systems could be more standardized.
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