BART Construction: "Along the Way" 1968 Bay Area Rapid Transit District

more at http://quickfound.net/

'Depicts actual construction progress throughout the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit System during 1967-68...'

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is a rapid transit public transportation system serving the San Francisco Bay Area in California. The heavy rail elevated and subway system connects San Francisco and Oakland with urban and suburban areas in Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Mateo counties. BART serves 48 stations along six routes on 112 miles (180 km) of rapid transit lines, including a ten-mile (16 km) spur line in eastern Contra Costa County which utilizes diesel multiple-unit trains and a 3.2-mile (5.1 km) automated guideway transit line to the Oakland International Airport. With an average of 411,000 weekday passengers and 118 million annual passengers in fiscal year 2019, BART is the fifth-busiest heavy rail rapid transit system in the United States.

BART is operated by the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, formed in 1957. The initial system opened in stages from 1972 to 1974. The Silicon Valley BART Extension is scheduled to open in Milpitas and Berryessa (San Jose) in 2020, in partnership with the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA)...

Some of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system's current coverage area was once served by an electrified streetcar and suburban train system called the Key System. This early 20th-century system once had regular transbay traffic across the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, but the system was dismantled in the 1950s, with its last transbay crossing in 1958, and was superseded by highway travel. A 1950s study of traffic problems in the Bay Area concluded the most cost-effective solution for the Bay Area's traffic woes would be to form a transit district charged with the construction and operation of a new, high-speed rapid transit system linking the cities and suburbs.[9] Marvin E. Lewis, a San Francisco trial attorney and member of the city's board of supervisors spearheaded a grassroots movement to advance the idea of an alternative bay crossing and the possibility of regional transit network.

Formal planning for BART began with the setting up in 1957 of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, a county-based special-purpose district body that governs the BART system. The district initially began with five members, all of which were projected to receive BART lines: Alameda County, Contra Costa County, the City and County of San Francisco, San Mateo County, and Marin County. Although invited to participate, Santa Clara County supervisors elected not to join BART due to their dissatisfaction that the peninsula line only stopped at Palo Alto initially, and that it interfered with suburban development in San Jose, preferring instead to concentrate on constructing freeways and expressways. Though the system will expand into Santa Clara County in 2019, it is still not a district member.

In 1962... The withdrawals of Marin and San Mateo resulted in a downsizing of the original system plans, which would have had lines as far south as Palo Alto and northward past San Rafael. Voters in the three remaining participating counties approved the truncated system, with termini in Fremont, Richmond, Concord, and Daly City, in 1962.

Construction of the system began in 1964, and included a number of major engineering challenges, including excavating subway tunnels in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley; constructing aerial structures throughout the Bay Area, particularly in Alameda and Contra Costa counties; tunneling through the Berkeley hills on the Concord line; and lowering the system's centerpiece, the Transbay Tube connecting Oakland and San Francisco, into a trench dredged onto the floor of San Francisco Bay.

Early years and train control problems

Passenger service began on September 11, 1972, initially just between MacArthur and Fremont. The rest of the system opened in stages, with the entire system opening in 1974 when the transbay service through the Transbay Tube began...