Three of a Kind

Thanks to Jacob Wiczkowski for alerting me to this post from the Western Railway Museum a few days ago. Their third BART cars has arrived! Following the arrival of an "A2" car in August and a "B2" car in September, they've now acquired "C1" car number 329. This car has led a less eventful existence than the other two, never having been renumbered or rebuilt, and is the only one of the trio to retain its as-built DC motors. It was built by Alstom in 1987 as a flat-end motor car, a way for BART to adopt a fleet more adaptable to changing needs for train lengths when compared with the original fleet, which consisted entirely of blind motors and "end cars" that couldn't easily be run mid-train.

This likely completes BART's presence on the PNAERC roster, at least for a while. I don't believe the system has retained any of its own first-generation cars for historic purposes, and certainly none of the giant 5'6"-gauge cars have gone to any other museums. With this arrival, WRM has a total of 69 cars on the PNAERC list, with 2,088 cars on the list in all.