A car from BART's retired train fleet is making its final journey shortly on the bed of a big rig truck to Tuolumne County, where it will be incorporated into a newly constructed vacation home designed by a local architect.

We learned about the so-called Sierra Train House back in 2022, when it was one of a group of eight projects that won a competition to acquire a decommissioned BART car from the agency, as the vintage train fleet was being junked.

Now, as KRON4 reports, lead train car Number 1234 is in the hands of Michael Lin of San Ramon, a design director at local firm Gensler and a UC Berkeley architecture grad. Lin's proposal to repurpose the train car as part of a vacation home is now becoming a reality, with Number 1234 getting loaded onto a truck today at BART’s Hayward Yard.

It will then take a journey to property Lin owns near the Gold Country town of Jamestown, in the Sierra foothills, where it will get incorporated into Lin's design, seen in renderings and a model below. Lin plans for this to be his second home, and he will also be making it available as a vacation rental. (He received final approvals for the project in October.)

"[You’ll] be able to push a button and have it say ‘the doors are closing. Please stand clear of the doors,'” Lin tells KRON4.

He adds, "I feel this responsibility to almost preserve it in this way so that other people can kind of experience it and be able to say, ‘gosh, I used to ride one of these,’ and tell their kids, I used to ride in one of these. So, I think it will be fun."

This transporting of the train car, which was donated by BART for free, is still a major expense for the project, estimated around $500,000.

Lin tells KRON4 that he "Bumped heads with my wife a little bit but she’s been super understanding" about the cost.