Car Plates: All About Plates
Common Plates - Plates used across cars
CAR NUMBER PLATE
AUTOMATIC CAR IDENTIFICATION (ACI) PLATE
Until the 1990s, BART used a slightly customized version of KarTrak. This was used to log cars for the purposes of tracking hours (which indicate the car's progressive usage until the next preventative maintenance, happening about every 600/800 hours).
These were mounted on the YR and XL ends of the cars, and replaced in the early 1990s with a barcode. Sometimes it's called the AVI plate (automatic vehicle identification). |
For those that lose sleep over pointless stuff like this, BART's custom ACI format was as follows (as per analysis of a dozen scans):
CHECK DIGIT STOP 1=B car; 2=A car; 4=C car 1s digit of car number 10s digit of car number 100s digit of car number 0 0 0 0 0 0 START |
BARCODE
RFID TAG
A, A2, and B2 cars
C1 cars
C2 cars
Lease agreement plate, located on the X end carbody. Mounted below the builder's plate.
I'm afraid I don't have a picture of the C2 car exterior builder's plate. They were hard to find (must have all fallen off), but my memory says that it had no build date, but said something like "CARBODY NUMBER __" (__ equating to C2 car 25__). Help appreciated! |
Fleet of the Future
Located near the doors, the new cars had two different versions of car number signage. The first, adhesive mounted glow-in-the dark sign, was replaced in 2022 with the screwed-in type of sign.