B.R.Stokes was a PR hack who promoted the system to get the voters to pass the bond measures and off the ground. Unfortunetly he had very little if any engineering expertise, which is what was needed to get the system built. The California Public Utilities (PUC) had considerable experiance both with with the stuctures and electrical side of what was needed.
The PUC still had considerable staff from 10 years earlier that was involved with various issues concerning electric interurbans. The last being the Key System and the Pacific Electric. PUC staff was well aware of the issues of morning dew and signal systems. PUC had investigated the Key System signals out to the Key Route pier when it had similar problems back in the 1920's. The first fight the PUC had was BART claimed the PUC did not have authority over them. The court issued a summary judgement to the PUC less then a month after a case was filed. The precedent was PUC's long standing authority over MUNI. BART defense was that PUC had no authority over "duo rail modes". The court case was the begining of the end for BR Stokes and many of the BART board members.
I can remember all kinds of issues BART had to deal with. Some of them resulted in preventable fatalities.
If you want to see good info about BART's problems. If you can find them many of the articles written by Harre Demoro of the then San Francisco Examiner and later the Chronicle.
Thx IGN
Nothing like a load of self promotion.
BART is still the poster child for dumb basic mistakes. First was not admitting it was a railroad. Railroads were not cool.
Second was choosing to use unexperienced vendors. Having Westinghouse do the control system was the worst. Having Rohr, an aerospace outfit, build the cars was the other.
Pushing the technological envelope as they tried to do was not a bad idea in itself, but doing it with newbies was just plain dumb.
Mac
There is an interesting discussion about the fight between W. H Wattenburg and BART over problems with their train control system 19721974. Scroll down the page it is in section "C Technical Descriptions of Main Projects":
http://wattenburg.us/
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
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