Car Plates: All About Plates
French cars from....France.
Old C1 cars had a nice plate.
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BART legacy cars had a lot of different plates/plaques through the years - here's a quick list of most of them.
Note, the new cars only have interior car number plates, which will be uploaded to the bottom of the page soon. |
Common Plates - Plates used across cars
CAR NUMBER PLATE
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These plates are on the corner of every legacy fleet car, sans the Y end of the A and A2 cars. They denote the car number and the car end (Y end = cab end for A and C cars; X end is the opposite end).
The largest ones, I believe, are the C2 car plates with plenty of room to spare a fifth digit. |
AUTOMATIC CAR IDENTIFICATION (ACI) PLATE
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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
B2 car 1712 retained this sort of inverse residue for many years
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The barcode (BARTcode ha) mounted adjacent to the old ACI location was used until the 2000s, for the same purposes of the ACI plate.
The major problem for this system was reliability - BART can be dirty. |
RFID TAG
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A small RFID tag, mounted below the doors on the skirting of the car, replaced the barcode system.
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A, A2, and B2 cars
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Rohr builder's plate - located on the cab door, but I have yet to see a high resolution image of it. Help appreciated.
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Rebuilding plate - Adtranz and Bombardier (later rebuilds), depending on the year. On inside all A2 and B2 cars on the X end right side corner.
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C1 cars
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Builder's plate, mounted on the X end carbody. Dates range from 1987 to 1990.
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Builder's plate, mounted on the cab door.
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C2 cars
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Builder's plate, mounted on the cab door. IIRC the first few of them might have said "HORNELL, NEW YORK" given their assembly location.
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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
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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.
