Want to up the number of trains BART can run between Oakland and San Francisco? That takes juice. And lots of it.
“This substation plus the new station at Civic Center brought up our power by 20 percent,” explained Gordon Wong, BART’s principal electrical engineer, during a press tour of the new substation at Montgomery BART.
BART is currently installing an advanced train control system that will allow it to run 30 trains per hour through the Transbay Tube, up from its current capacity of 24. But controlling the trains is one thing—it also requires more electrical power to move the heavy trains, especially during acceleration. And that means more transformers to convert AC power to DC for the train’s motors. To provide that power, BART repurposed part of a hallway on Montgomery’s concourse and expanded one of its electrical rooms. Thousands of BART riders walk past these rooms every day, unaware of the modern electrical hardware and engineers who together make their commutes possible.
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