The Rohr BART trains lasted nearly 50 years in service before they were retired and scrapped. Plus they were ahead of their time as one of the first fully automated train control.
Thank you for your comment and for watching! Yes, you are certainly right about the BART cars lasting a long time (although they may not have been in the best of shape when retired). I also recall reading an article a couple of years ago, how the maintenance department had to go onto eBay and purchase old laptops that ran on DOS - it was the only way to communicate with the BART cars!
@@JeffreyOrnsteinRobot from TV series Lost in Space.......I am far superior to those ancient computers. I can talk to them like I could talk to Dr. Smith and the Robinson family. 😊
@@JeffreyOrnstein Thank You for this video about the BART cars. I've loved going on BART since I was a kid in the 1970s. I also love the Grumann/Flxible videos you do. I rode on those buses when they were new in the 1980s. It's sad that Flxible went out of business.
Interesting sidelight to that notion in the article that transit agencies should not set specifications so tightly, and let the companies do what they want... The Boeing-Vertol streetcars were so awful that only two cities (Boston and San Francisco) ever used them, with Boston even rejecting much of its order as unreliable, choosing to stick with then-fifty-year-old PCC streetcars that had to be repaired by custom-building each part. At one point, a scandal erupted there when a reporter found that many brand new, but unusable, Boeings had been stuffed into unused tunnels downtown. Of the just one or two such Boeings that made it to museums, not a single one of the cars still works. Contrast that with the hundreds of working examples of earlier streetcars, such as the 1922 Perley-Thomas cars in daily service in New Orleans. Meanwhile, the Boeing folks were faced with the CTA in Chicago, which had designed their preferred car type in the late 1940s, and went to Boeing-Vertol with a complete set of plans and specifications that left the airplane builder no choice but to use the exact parts and design specified. It was a case of "build us more of these." While modernized to use the best actual rail equipment of the time, the Boeing cars had a very long and unremarkable lifespan on the CTA "L", running reliably and lasting until very recent times. So, which plan worked better? Let the companies build whatever junk they wanted, or build an actual railcar specified down to the last bolt and nut? Sure looks like the CTA was the only winner of the aerospace incursion that really only occurred because of the end of the Vietnam War. They ordered their own design, and got what they wanted. The aerospace engineers seemed to think that building trains was easy, never quite realizing how tough it is to build a reliable cars that, unlike an airplane, is not massaged constantly by flocks of mechanics.
Thank you for watching and for your very detailed comment! The whole Boeing LRV debacle sounds like it's a good idea for a future video. As for the CTA's 2400 series builty by Boeing-Vertol, yes, you are right! I missed that one! I just looked it up in CERA's Chicago Rolling Stock Volume II, and here's why it may have worked out for the CTA: The body shell was fabricated in Portugal, and the trucks and motors and some electrical equipment were from Germany. So Boeing didn't build all of it (or maybe most of it), so in addition to laying down their own specs, they won out with the 2400s, which could have turned out a mess otherwise...
@@JeffreyOrnstein I suspect it would be a good topic. Start with the search term "United States Standard Light Rail Vehicle," the official government-issue name of the Boeing-Vertol streetcar. First American use of the term light rail, too. There are a few places online that detail the Boston debacle. San Francisco ended up with those cars, distinguishable by their different interiors. (Yes, despite the yells about standardization, the Muni and MBTA cars were different inside.) As an original design, the Boeings are like that quote from Samuel Johnson, "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
Yeah, this is a hotly debated topic because transit vehicle procurement is so incredibly visible from start to finish. Over-speccing has its own pitfalls. Most procurements these days fall somewhere in between where carbuilders bring their own platforms and customise them, either in configuration of existing subsystems or swapping to agency-preferred subsystems and suppliers. The majority of procurements these days do follow functional requirements rather than detailed technical specifications. Now that I'm involved in specifying passenger info systems myself, the devil in the detail is clear to me: functional requirements can still end up sourcing unreliable or stupidly bespoke components.
Rohr also bought Flxible and designed and built the Flxible model 870 Advanced Design Bus, which also turned out to be an engineering disaster initially. It soon sold Flxible to Grumman.
The Bart fleet was based on the design of the R40 subway cars of NYC of which the first few R40s were delivered in November 1967 with the rest of the fleet coming in 1968 til 1969. They were the first to have the sloped front end where the motorman seats. I am old enough to remember when they were new. 😊
Bombardier has done equally well or poorly depending on how you look at it in Aerospace and Transit. Their failure was more recent in both aspects, selling off many of their aircraft off and their entire transportation division to Alstom, leaving to my knowledge only private jet manufacturing of the Challenger and Global series.
Thanks for your comment! Yes, Bombardier also had issues before they sold off their transit-related manufacturing. The R-179 subway cars for New York were very problematic at first, with accusations that the San Francisco BART order (which replaced the ROHR cars) was put first and given more attention. The New York issues may have lost them a lot of money.
@@JeffreyOrnstein Bombardier went on a huge shopping tour in years before, taking over other conglomerates such as Adtranz and DWA ... They had problems in numerous markets and didn't manage to get their trains for ÖBB approved so the contract was cancelled and ÖBB got Siemens trains instead since they had contract terms to meet. Things don't seem to go considerably better under Alstom with numerous deliveries under great delays.
Rode the UA Turbo, BOS to NYP Hard riding, bouncy and noisy. The turbines roared deafeningly as it accelerated with lower performance than a straight off the wire local MU "washboard". Still it was faster than the Acela is today on the stretch through New Haven line electric commuter territory due to not being subject to slow orders from sagging catenary. Great view in the dome. Broke down so often the premium fare was dropped. Turbines are a poor choice except when running at one speed for long periods.
The reason for the train running off the tracks was due to dirty rail. Remember BART used cylindrical wheels (presumably for better electrical pickup) rather than standard tapered railroad wheels. It had just rained and the car wheels could not pick up the stop signal. The fix was to add wire brushes ahead of the wheels to scrape off the rust. Seemed to have worked.
In the case of the Rohr Corporation, that by the way was a sub assembly supplier to larger aerospace companies, that built the bart and Washington Metro cars, fabricated the car shells using materials and processes that were not used in the building of airplanes or passenger rail cars.
5:50: The Pullman Company merged with Standard Car Company in the 1930s to become Pullman-Standard, not the other way around. 11:12: Boeing's light rail cars were built in its Vertol plant in Philadelphia, not Seattle. 14:21: Rohr (a name, not an abbreviation) had nothing to do with GM's Aerotrain which used modified GM bus bodies.
Sorta makes sense a bus or train cabin made light but strong just like a aircraft fuselage, in fact in Australia Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in Melbourne Australia built bus cabins and Ansett Airlines Engineering workshop also built busses as Ansett Transport Industries the parent company of Ansett Pioneer Bus lines
Please add a credit line for the Bartchives - most of the BART images are from my site (my collection and the collections of others, of which I have permission). Many of these images were never uploaded to the internet before me, so I can tell you are aware of the site. Thanks.
Hello, thank you for your message. I have added a credit line in the first line of the video description. Hopefully this is acceptable. Thank you for your understanding. Your archive of images was certainly very interesting, hopefully viewers will visit your archive!
Thank you for watching and for your comment! The ROHR Monocab, from what I know was only installed at a few expositions, and the cars often became stalled on the overhead guiderails, stranding passengers. Maybe I'll do further research, and if I can find enough info, create a future video on it.
A related example might be the British Advanced Passenger Train. Its project team included some aerospace engineers, but the resulting design proved a little too sophisticated and exacting for the railway industry of the time; difficult to build, expensive to operate, and hopelessly temperamental. Its contemporary, the much less ambitious HST, was an evolution of existing railway technology, and proved vastly more successful.
It is intriguing how aerospace companies turn to transportation when the Pentagon’s teat dries up between wars. In their infinite hubris and ego, how hard can making choo choos and buses be?! And it’s not just transit. Lockheed Martin got into “ITS” (intelligent transportation systems) in the 90s when defense spending was down during the Clinton administration. It was comical to see guys in Lockheed Martin reflective vests roadside, digging ditches and trenching fiber optics. They quickly exited after 9/11, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake for DOTs to deal with. Not that all transit/transportation companies are free of blame, mind you-CAF (Viewliners) and Nippon Sharyo (aborted midwest bilevel) for two. But by and large, these aerospace companies are better off staying in their lane, fleecing the DoD.
It seems to mee that where Rohr went wrong was in trying to be too smart. Diversification in and of itself is usually a good move, but it diversified into three areas completely unknown to it, and using technology that was unproven and untested. When the 70s oil embargo and recession hit, the government yanked funding in all of those areas Rohr had expanded to and it hand no money left to work with. Had they focused on just one (rapid transit), it would have had more resources to survive, and it likely would have picked up additional orders for vehicles in the 80s and 90s.
You are reading to us the text of articles that do not explain why aerospace companies' technological and manufacturing decisions did not produce suitable railcars. Instead of doing that, summarize what you read and then get into the nuts and bolts of the materials and manufacturing ad why they did not work out. I can read articles as well as you can.
Grumman of Nassau County, Long Island, built fighter jet planes for the U.S. Air Force. In 1980 they built the worst city transit buses in NYC. They looked like boxes on wheels and the diesel engines caugh fire and often fell out under the back of the buss.
@@JeffreyOrnstein They also ran on the B56 bus line on Jamaica Avenue and the bus drivers despised them. By the way when I was attending Junior High School 217 in Briarwood, Queens, the B55 bus line also ran on Jamaica Ave but left me one block from my home. When the first bus came it was the B55 and I didn't mind walking one block to my home. I got on and sat across the bus driver and I looked at the builder's plate on the dashboard. It said built by GM 1949 and it was still running in 1971! Back then GM built vehicles were built to last. 😁
Sorta makes sense a bus or train cabin made light but strong just like a aircraft fuselage, in fact in Australia Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in Melbourne Australia built bus cabins and Ansett Airlines Engineering workshop also built busses as Ansett Transport Industries the parent company of Ansett Pioneer Bus lines
The Rohr BART trains lasted nearly 50 years in service before they were retired and scrapped. Plus they were ahead of their time as one of the first fully automated train control.
Thank you for your comment and for watching! Yes, you are certainly right about the BART cars lasting a long time (although they may not have been in the best of shape when retired). I also recall reading an article a couple of years ago, how the maintenance department had to go onto eBay and purchase old laptops that ran on DOS - it was the only way to communicate with the BART cars!
@@JeffreyOrnsteinRobot from TV series Lost in Space.......I am far superior to those ancient computers. I can talk to them like I could talk to Dr. Smith and the Robinson family. 😊
@@JeffreyOrnstein Thank You for this video about the BART cars. I've loved going on BART since I was a kid in the 1970s. I also love the Grumann/Flxible videos you do. I rode on those buses when they were new in the 1980s. It's sad that Flxible went out of business.
Interesting sidelight to that notion in the article that transit agencies should not set specifications so tightly, and let the companies do what they want... The Boeing-Vertol streetcars were so awful that only two cities (Boston and San Francisco) ever used them, with Boston even rejecting much of its order as unreliable, choosing to stick with then-fifty-year-old PCC streetcars that had to be repaired by custom-building each part. At one point, a scandal erupted there when a reporter found that many brand new, but unusable, Boeings had been stuffed into unused tunnels downtown. Of the just one or two such Boeings that made it to museums, not a single one of the cars still works. Contrast that with the hundreds of working examples of earlier streetcars, such as the 1922 Perley-Thomas cars in daily service in New Orleans.
Meanwhile, the Boeing folks were faced with the CTA in Chicago, which had designed their preferred car type in the late 1940s, and went to Boeing-Vertol with a complete set of plans and specifications that left the airplane builder no choice but to use the exact parts and design specified. It was a case of "build us more of these." While modernized to use the best actual rail equipment of the time, the Boeing cars had a very long and unremarkable lifespan on the CTA "L", running reliably and lasting until very recent times.
So, which plan worked better? Let the companies build whatever junk they wanted, or build an actual railcar specified down to the last bolt and nut? Sure looks like the CTA was the only winner of the aerospace incursion that really only occurred because of the end of the Vietnam War. They ordered their own design, and got what they wanted. The aerospace engineers seemed to think that building trains was easy, never quite realizing how tough it is to build a reliable cars that, unlike an airplane, is not massaged constantly by flocks of mechanics.
Thank you for watching and for your very detailed comment! The whole Boeing LRV debacle sounds like it's a good idea for a future video.
As for the CTA's 2400 series builty by Boeing-Vertol, yes, you are right! I missed that one! I just looked it up in CERA's Chicago Rolling Stock Volume II, and here's why it may have worked out for the CTA: The body shell was fabricated in Portugal, and the trucks and motors and some electrical equipment were from Germany. So Boeing didn't build all of it (or maybe most of it), so in addition to laying down their own specs, they won out with the 2400s, which could have turned out a mess otherwise...
@@JeffreyOrnstein I suspect it would be a good topic. Start with the search term "United States Standard Light Rail Vehicle," the official government-issue name of the Boeing-Vertol streetcar. First American use of the term light rail, too. There are a few places online that detail the Boston debacle. San Francisco ended up with those cars, distinguishable by their different interiors. (Yes, despite the yells about standardization, the Muni and MBTA cars were different inside.)
As an original design, the Boeings are like that quote from Samuel Johnson, "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
As I recall, the articulated bodies of the Boeing cars had a nasty habit of derailing on tight curves.
@@Greatdome99 Yes... Boeing had designed their own version of an articulation joint, and it did not work nearly as well as they expected.
Yeah, this is a hotly debated topic because transit vehicle procurement is so incredibly visible from start to finish. Over-speccing has its own pitfalls. Most procurements these days fall somewhere in between where carbuilders bring their own platforms and customise them, either in configuration of existing subsystems or swapping to agency-preferred subsystems and suppliers. The majority of procurements these days do follow functional requirements rather than detailed technical specifications. Now that I'm involved in specifying passenger info systems myself, the devil in the detail is clear to me: functional requirements can still end up sourcing unreliable or stupidly bespoke components.
Rohr also bought Flxible and designed and built the Flxible model 870 Advanced Design Bus, which also turned out to be an engineering disaster initially. It soon sold Flxible to Grumman.
Thank you for watching and for your very relevant comment, Glenn!
The Bart fleet was based on the design of the R40 subway cars of NYC of which the first few R40s were delivered in November 1967 with the rest of the fleet coming in 1968 til 1969. They were the first to have the sloped front end where the motorman seats. I am old enough to remember when they were new. 😊
Thank you for watching and for your comment and info!
Bombardier also exited the transit vehicle industry very recently with them selling off their transit vehicle devision to Alstom.
Thank you for watching and for your comment!
Bombardier has done equally well or poorly depending on how you look at it in Aerospace and Transit. Their failure was more recent in both aspects, selling off many of their aircraft off and their entire transportation division to Alstom, leaving to my knowledge only private jet manufacturing of the Challenger and Global series.
Thanks for your comment! Yes, Bombardier also had issues before they sold off their transit-related manufacturing. The R-179 subway cars for New York were very problematic at first, with accusations that the San Francisco BART order (which replaced the ROHR cars) was put first and given more attention. The New York issues may have lost them a lot of money.
@@JeffreyOrnstein Bombardier went on a huge shopping tour in years before, taking over other conglomerates such as Adtranz and DWA ... They had problems in numerous markets and didn't manage to get their trains for ÖBB approved so the contract was cancelled and ÖBB got Siemens trains instead since they had contract terms to meet. Things don't seem to go considerably better under Alstom with numerous deliveries under great delays.
@@uncipaws7643 Thank you for watching, and for your very informative comment!
They sold the regional jets to Airbus.
@@trainglen22This is true with the Bombardier C-series, which became the Airbus A220. The CRJ jet family, however, was sold to Mitsubishi.
Rode the UA Turbo, BOS to NYP Hard riding, bouncy and noisy. The turbines roared deafeningly as it accelerated with lower performance than a straight off the wire local MU "washboard". Still it was faster than the Acela is today on the stretch through New Haven line electric commuter territory due to not being subject to slow orders from sagging catenary. Great view in the dome. Broke down so often the premium fare was dropped. Turbines are a poor choice except when running at one speed for long periods.
Thank you for watching and for your very interesting comment on your experience riding the Turbo!
13:34 can we take a moment to admire that coach? It could have 999 problems but rigidity wasn't one
Thank you for your comment! Yes, the carbody sure survived tha accident!
The reason for the train running off the tracks was due to dirty rail. Remember BART used cylindrical wheels (presumably for better electrical pickup) rather than standard tapered railroad wheels. It had just rained and the car wheels could not pick up the stop signal. The fix was to add wire brushes ahead of the wheels to scrape off the rust. Seemed to have worked.
@@Greatdome99 Thank you for watching and for your very informative comment!
In the case of the Rohr Corporation, that by the way was a sub assembly supplier to larger aerospace companies, that built the bart and Washington Metro cars, fabricated the car shells using materials and processes that were not used in the building of airplanes or passenger rail cars.
Thank you for watching and for your interesting comment about Rohr!
5:50: The Pullman Company merged with Standard Car Company in the 1930s to become Pullman-Standard, not the other way around.
11:12: Boeing's light rail cars were built in its Vertol plant in Philadelphia, not Seattle.
14:21: Rohr (a name, not an abbreviation) had nothing to do with GM's Aerotrain which used modified GM bus bodies.
Thank you for watching and for your comments/corrections!
Sorta makes sense a bus or train cabin made light but strong just like a aircraft fuselage, in fact in Australia Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in Melbourne Australia built bus cabins and Ansett Airlines Engineering workshop also built busses as Ansett Transport Industries the parent company of Ansett Pioneer Bus lines
Please add a credit line for the Bartchives - most of the BART images are from my site (my collection and the collections of others, of which I have permission). Many of these images were never uploaded to the internet before me, so I can tell you are aware of the site. Thanks.
Hello, thank you for your message. I have added a credit line in the first line of the video description. Hopefully this is acceptable. Thank you for your understanding. Your archive of images was certainly very interesting, hopefully viewers will visit your archive!
Do you have any more info about the ROHR Monocab?
Thank you for watching and for your comment! The ROHR Monocab, from what I know was only installed at a few expositions, and the cars often became stalled on the overhead guiderails, stranding passengers. Maybe I'll do further research, and if I can find enough info, create a future video on it.
A related example might be the British Advanced Passenger Train. Its project team included some aerospace engineers, but the resulting design proved a little too sophisticated and exacting for the railway industry of the time; difficult to build, expensive to operate, and hopelessly temperamental. Its contemporary, the much less ambitious HST, was an evolution of existing railway technology, and proved vastly more successful.
Thank you for watching and for your comment! Yes, both the APT-E and APT-P were quite interesting!
The United Aircraft Turbo train was built by Pullman Standard and in Canada by Can-car.
Thank you for your comment! Yes, Pullman fabricated the carbodies at their plant...but I would guess UAC provided the turbines.
@@JeffreyOrnstein that they did. My grandfather worked at United Aircraft (now called Pratt and Whitney) on the turbines for the CN ones.
It is intriguing how aerospace companies turn to transportation when the Pentagon’s teat dries up between wars. In their infinite hubris and ego, how hard can making choo choos and buses be?!
And it’s not just transit. Lockheed Martin got into “ITS” (intelligent transportation systems) in the 90s when defense spending was down during the Clinton administration. It was comical to see guys in Lockheed Martin reflective vests roadside, digging ditches and trenching fiber optics. They quickly exited after 9/11, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake for DOTs to deal with.
Not that all transit/transportation companies are free of blame, mind you-CAF (Viewliners) and Nippon Sharyo (aborted midwest bilevel) for two. But by and large, these aerospace companies are better off staying in their lane, fleecing the DoD.
Thank you for watching and for your very interesting comment!
Sharyo's diesels are nice
If only the original MARTA cars were built by Rohr, than all 3 of the "new era metros" in the US would have Rohr equipment.
Thanks for your comment and for watching! Yes, you're right....I did read Rohr wasn't interested in bidding for Atlanta.
Interesting, but ultimately this is 12 minutes of reading an old newspaper.
Ok, thanks.
It seems to mee that where Rohr went wrong was in trying to be too smart. Diversification in and of itself is usually a good move, but it diversified into three areas completely unknown to it, and using technology that was unproven and untested. When the 70s oil embargo and recession hit, the government yanked funding in all of those areas Rohr had expanded to and it hand no money left to work with. Had they focused on just one (rapid transit), it would have had more resources to survive, and it likely would have picked up additional orders for vehicles in the 80s and 90s.
Thank you for your excellent comment!
You are reading to us the text of articles that do not explain why aerospace companies' technological and manufacturing decisions did not produce suitable railcars. Instead of doing that, summarize what you read and then get into the nuts and bolts of the materials and manufacturing ad why they did not work out. I can read articles as well as you can.
Thanks for watching!
Grumman of Nassau County, Long Island, built fighter jet planes for the U.S. Air Force. In 1980 they built the worst city transit buses in NYC. They looked like boxes on wheels and the diesel engines caugh fire and often fell out under the back of the buss.
LOL, amazing that this bus was from Grumman! Thank you for watching and for your comment!
@@JeffreyOrnstein They also ran on the B56 bus line on Jamaica Avenue and the bus drivers despised them. By the way when I was attending Junior High School 217 in Briarwood, Queens, the B55 bus line also ran on Jamaica Ave but left me one block from my home. When the first bus came it was the B55 and I didn't mind walking one block to my home. I got on and sat across the bus driver and I looked at the builder's plate on the dashboard. It said built by GM 1949 and it was still running in 1971! Back then GM built vehicles were built to last. 😁
Sorta makes sense a bus or train cabin made light but strong just like a aircraft fuselage, in fact in Australia Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in Melbourne Australia built bus cabins and Ansett Airlines Engineering workshop also built busses as Ansett Transport Industries the parent company of Ansett Pioneer Bus lines
Interesting information! Thank you for watching and for your comment!