⁴ᴷ⁶⁰ BART: Fleet of the Future and Legacy Trains at North Berkeley + New Real-Time Station Displays

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On Monday, September 2, 2019, BART released its newly updated real-time departure displays at all mainline stations throughout the system, complete with new door information that tells riders whether the next train has three-door (Fleet of the Future) or two-door (legacy fleet) cars. The displays will also report cancelled trains, instead of the train simply disappearing from the screens without warning.

Needless to say, we had to check this out, so we headed to North Berkeley, where Fleet of the Future trains are known to frequently run on.

Turns out, the automated station announcements have gotten an update too, as George and Gracie (BART's names for their station announcers) now announce the number of doors for each train.

This new system is essentially BART's first Fleet of the Future train tracker, since riders are now able to know the number of doors for upcoming train arrivals.

Currently, BART runs two Fleet of the Future trains on the Orange line and one on the Red line, which makes this segment of the system ideal for finding new trains. And with these new real-time departure displays, we don't have to randomly guess anymore on where these trains are located. We managed to see two here at North Berkeley, as well as many legacy trains passing through the relatively quiet station.

BART plans to extend this new display info to the BART app, as well as its website and codec for third-party developers who seek this information. In the future, the screens will also display when a train is delayed in front of a station. Let us know what you think of these new displays in the comments.