BART's been having a bad run of system breakdowns and mechanical troubles the past couple months, and Thursday morning brought a new one which stranded a small group of BART riders for over an hour.
The incident occurred on the eBART extension, which is a small extension train in Contra Costa County that connects Pittsburg/Bay Point Station to Pittsburg Center and Antioch.
As the Chronicle reports, the eBART train left Antioch Station just after 8 am Thursday, headed toward Pittsburg/Bay Point, and then encountered a mechanical problem that stopped the train some distance shy of the BART station.
A rider on the train tells the paper that the emergency brake kicked in, and ultimately the operator came on the intercom and explained that an air hose in the braking apparatus had failed.
A mechanic reportedly told riders that this type of failure had "never happened before," and the solution was to bring in a crew to slowly tow the disabled train into Pittsburg/Bay Point station. The process took over an hour, and the train ultimately arrived at 9:35 am.
BART issued an alert at 9:10 am saying that service was stopped between Antioch and Pittsburg/Bay Point stations, and advising passengers to use Tri Delta bus service instead.
This follows on a different issue that halted service between Antioch and Pittsburg/Bay Point four days ago, when BART said that major delays were "due to an equipment problem on the track."
eBART service was added to the Yellow Line in 2018, after a study almost two decades earlier concluded that using an existing railway track with a different track gauge than BART uses would save the agency and Contra Costa County hundreds of millions of dollars, but it would require a transfer to a different, smaller train.
These trains, therefore, have only been in service about eight years.
Elsewhere in the BART system, aging infrastructure and other issues have led to multiple disruptive events in recent weeks and months. An aging, overtaxed HVAC system at Daly City was blamed for a substation fire earlier this month, and a communications issue led to a major meltdown in the system in February. An equipment explosion on the tracks in San Francisco led to major systemwide delays last November, and an "equipment problem" in the Transbay Tube caused similarly widespread delays a month earlier.
These troubles come as BART has been reporting steadily increasing ridership and decreasing crime stats.
BART had its biggest post-pandemic ridership day last Tuesday, with 242,090 trips on the system. That is still about 40% below pre-pandemic weekday averages.
Related: Debris Fire on BART Track Near 24th and Mission Leads to Widespread Delays
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