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© 1997 - 2006 by James Mohler All rights reserved. Version 3.5

 

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Heavy Rail

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Today's Feature

Three tracks are necessary at Daly City and Colma to turn around trains from all over the East Bay.
Jan 31, 1998

Agencies

Breda

Description: Breda (now Ansaldobreda) rapid transit cars in Los Angeles and light rail cars in San Francisco

Official Sites: Ansaldobreda

Unofficial Sites: Breda Yarns!

Unofficial Sites: www.breda.com

 

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Quick History

Even at the worst days of streetcar abandonments, heavy rail systems remained largely intact. Cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and others lost most if not all of there streetcar lines, but still kept their subways, els, and surface rapid transit lines. Even the few cities that did keep streetcar lines, had facilities that resembled full rapid transit. San Francisco had the Twin Peaks Tunnel, Philadelphia had the subway surface lines, Cleveland had a dedicated right of way, and so on.

In the 1970's when first attempts at a rail renaissance occurred, planning and thinking was focused on full rapid transit. The first new system was BART in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was followed by Washington Metro, Atlanta Subway, Miami Metro, and Baltimore Metro. After many of these system yielded less than resounding results, interest waned. In fact only Los Angeles Metro Red Line would follow. Due to huge cost overruns in Los Angeles, not only is it unlike that there will be a extensions to the Red Line, light rail construction has also been halted, and a trolley bus program has been cancelled.

Planners for BART where so focused on heavy rail that when they built the two level Market Street Subway, they built the upper level very similar to the lower level. To this day, the lower level has huge 10 car trains and the upper level gets streetcars that often come in single cars or pairs. Almost by accident did San Francisco get a system where at one moment a train is behaving like rapid transit and at the next it is a very local streetcar.

Even on the other start up systems growth has been very slow. It would 25 years from the time BART opened until a new station would be added to the system. Miami choose not to extend its line, but to use a busway as a feeder instead. Baltimore's second new line uses light rail technology and a surface routing through downtown Baltimore. Older heavy rail systems have similarly not done well. New York City, the quintessential heavy rail system spend major time and effort in just cleaning up the system. No small task given that it was once famous for being graffiti covered.

Perhaps the best thing that was learned from this is a more universal, flexible technology is necessary. One that can approach rapid transit standards, but also scale down to a heavy bus line might do. That technology would be light rail.