A BART equipment issue on Monday morning slowed systemwide travel and halted trains on multiple lines for hours, according to the agency.
The commuter nightmare, which shut down a track in the Transbay Tube that connects the East Bay and San Francisco, is the third major service meltdown on the transit agency’s trains in recent months.
BART said it had resolved the track issue around 9:15 a.m. and would resume normal transit through the tube, though it could take time to alleviate major delays.
“[It’s] certainly not the way we want to start a Monday morning,” spokesperson Chris Filippi told KQED.
The issue began just before 6 a.m., when the operator of a train moving through the Transbay Tube reported seeing a small explosion as it traveled toward West Oakland from Embarcadero station.
Filippi said the operator heard a popping sound.
“We sent an out of service train into the tube to do an investigation and that train reported seeing smoke,” he said. “Once that happened we stopped service on that track through the tube.”
For hours on Monday morning, the transit agency was forced to run both its north and southbound trains on one track through the tube, slowing travel in both directions. BART is still servicing all 50 of its stations, but it suspended all Red and Green line trains, which run from Antioch to San Francisco International Airport and Daly City to North San José, respectively.
Filippi said BART was extending Orange Line service during the outage to offset some of the effects of those outages.
Over the weekend, BART did rail replacement work along one of the tube’s tracks. Red and Green line service was paused during the maintenance late Saturday and into Sunday morning, and the agency similarly operated a single track through the corridor, which it said would cause delays of about 10 to 15 minutes.
It’s not yet clear if the work is related to Monday’s outage, Filippi said.
“We definitely appreciate the patience of our riders on this,” he said. “Even though we do have service to all 50 stations, we do still have major delays, and we know that’s a significant disruption for folks and we take that very seriously.”
Monday’s issues, and the network problems that halted all service for hours in May and September, come as BART faces a “fiscal cliff” and has floated cutting or reducing services if one-time state and federal funding dries up as expected next year. Transit advocates are lobbying to put a sales tax on the November 2026 ballot that would generate revenue for BART and other regional transit agencies also on the verge of major budget deficits.
KQED’s Brian Watt and Dan Brekke contributed to this report.
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