After years of dedicated service to the Bay Area, the legacy fleet of Bay Area cars was let out to pasture, with its “Fleet of the Future” taking its place in full last year. But those who love, and maybe even feel slightly nostalgic about the old cars, can soon see them in other places around the Bay Area. One is even transforming into a new home outside a California national park .
Michael Lin, a UC Berkeley architecture graduate, was one of several people who applied to a program in which BART gifted one of its cars from the retired fleet. On March 13, Number 1234 was loaded from BART’s Hayward Yard to make his vision a reality.
“He is covering the expenses of transporting and modifying it. BART provided it to him for free,” BART spokesperson Jim Allison told SFGATE in an email.
Lin is turning the BART car into a second home in Jamestown, about 45 miles outside of Yosemite National Park. First reported by KRON 4 , the home is also expected to double as a vacation rental called the Sierra Train House. BART added that the new home will run on green energy with a “solar panel roof, a gray water system and passive cooling.” “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,” Lin told KRON 4…