Anyone Remember BART Trains in O Gauge?

Yes, I do remember them.  I think Walthers may have made them in HO as well.

Tres cool!

These are the two different trains USTTC made running on a layout. Don

i remember that company, i just got out of the navy,,,didnt have much money,,,,thanks for the vid,,,,they are super cool,,,,,,and fun

Terry, the look of the polished metal cars was great. To bad they didn't make longer ones and close the gap between cars. They would have had a classic. I think I first saw then at a train store called Mail Aways or something like that in SF.  Don

Wow! I live in the Bay Area and never saw these. Thanks for the video.

I remember an HO BART set with extruded aluminum sides, plastic ends, and an Athearn drive. If I recall correctly, they were first offered by an independent firm and later by Walthers.

BART actually operates on 5' gauge, so a scale model of these cars would be a stretch.

Its too bad that MTH  didnt do the Washington D.C. metro. With that same car they could have done other cities too:

Atlanta

Miami Tri Rail

https://i0.wp.com/www.metroeas...in.png?fit=584%2C438

Baltimore

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic...X2vOPmw&usqp=CAU

BART

 https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic...99xfv_g&usqp=CAU

Don,

Not really, our 3-rail trains are, at 1/48th, sized for O gauge track that scales out to 5' between the rails. To be perfectly in scale, our trains would need to be 1/45th scale like some of the European trains.

A 1/48th BART train would be exactly in scale using 5' between the rails track that we use !

Ed Boyle

I remember seeing this train in the TCA Museum for quite a few years.  It may have been taken off display in more recent years, as a display of items from the National Christmas Center took residence on the wall where this was located.  (The same wall used to have many MTH and Weaver trains, as well as a few other odd-ball manufacturers - this was the display wall to the left of the Standard Gauge layout)

-Dave

I remember the HO Walthers ones.  They look nothing like the cars I rode last year.  Those cars were old and dull.  Not shiny and new like the Walthers cars!

Very nice models indeed. Too bad Lionel and MTH missed the opportunity to do those.

Scale Rail, Cool trains, cool video, thanks for sharing these unique trains with us here on the forum. Happy Railroading 

Was there not a Washington Metro set also?

L and M missed out.  People think of two things with BART:  Mass transit or a bratty kid.

Scale Rail

Looks like you have two sets there, running very well.

Several Years ago, Rich De Blasi had two partial sets at York in the blue hall.

 He had the Bart which has the shovel nose and the Washington Metro which is flat looking more like a subway car.

He only had the power car and middle coach of each. I took the Metro set and he promised to keep looking for the tail car. (He was liquidating a massive collection that was in great disarray) About two Yorks later he handed me his keys and told me to go look in his trunk. There I found the Metro tail car! It made my York.

NEVER was a fan of that brat kid, but have always been a fan of the BART system. Always rode it when in San Francisco, both within the city limits and to Oakland and beyond.

I did one for a friend years ago.

He had extra cars and the Marx motor was not up to the task.

I fitted a can motor in the Marx power chassis. On the first test run with the prototype in a pre-war Marx M-10,000 that motor and train ran for seven hours at the mall without a hiccup. That told me I had a winner and several more can motored Marx locos have been out shopped from the Clinton Street shops.

Jonathan, Bart had many problems when they started. I was in the air filming aerials on their first day of running so I didn't get to ride it for a few days. They blow millions of dollars to make it a manless operating system but found it didn't work. Also the slant nose was a bad design because it was time consuming changing the size of a train. For the morning rush you might have sets of ten car trains. Unless you made a smaller train after the rush you pulled half empty cars all day. If you wanted to cut off some of the cars you had to go back to the yard and build a smaller train for mid day, then rebuild the train for the evening run. I remember seeing full yards of cars that had problems for weeks and weeks. The five foot gauge was a money pit. Almost nothing was off the shelf. The real sad story was taking the Key system trolley off the Bay Bridge and only a few year later building the Bart tube under the bay. Bart turned out to be only two or three minutes faster than the old key system. Don

Just realize Tom Stephenson worked for Rohr Industries and was in charge of design of the BART program. No wonder his company United States Toy Train Company made the O gauge BART train. Don

Checked ebay and 3 items sold in the last month, prices ranged from $250 for a power unit, $350 for a 4 car set from Trainz and $1100 for a boxed set.  One of the listings said only 200 were made and none currently listed

NICE to know they are still available!