Proto-Future and the Beginner's Guide to Model Railroading
Oct 30, 2026 · 23 min · 12 segments
Audio from the YouTube video series describing my journey to visit, ride, and bicycle every DMU system in the US. Video found at: https://www.youtube.com/@\G\IV…
So this is a system we're already familiar with, seeing as we were just in the North Bay with SMART, but the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, or BART, is a broad-gauge Great Society metro that opened primarily, I believe, in the 1970s, and covers most of the Bay Area not really as a subway, but more like some sort of weird abomination of regional rail with subway-style vehicles.
Pointing in the direction of it being a regional rail, it has absolutely garbage late night and weekend service.
This is, in many instances, primarily a white people train through black people neighborhoods, and has a howl like you would not believe, even now when they supposedly quote-unquote fixed it.
But enough of my opinions on subway systems, this is about DMUs, so where's the DMU on this map? So we're looking primarily at the Contra Costa County area, which in addition to BART actually has a surprisingly good service with the Capitol Corridor, the Amtrak train that runs mostly between Oakland and Sacramento, with a few services a day going south to San Jose and only one a day going past Sacramento to Rockland and Auburn.
But between Sacramento and Oakland, this actually provides a pretty spectacular regional rail function to not just the major cities like Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Davis, and Sacramento, but also some smaller suburban communities in the vicinity of Contra Costa County, such as Richmond, Martinez, and Antioch.
And so as a result, being both effectively an intercity train as well as a local regional rail, it has actually one of the highest riderships of any Amtrak route in the entire United States, really only being beaten by, of course, the Northeast Corridor and Acela, and then also Surfliner, which is a very similar train in the Los Angeles and San Diego area.
But nonetheless, an intercity train is not local transit, and so for a long time Contra Costa County had been attempting to expand transit service into its otherwise largely and annoyingly suburban confines.
There is a current station in downtown Richmond, and I believe it is future-proofed for this three-station extension, but this seems to have never gone anywhere.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Contra Costa County, the east side, there was an East Bart extension being considered.
It was in planning since 2005, which just shows California's severe problems with bureaucracy and woke 1.0 environmental review, but finally opened over a decade later in May 2018.
For two stations.
Dear gods, the United States is doomed.
It opened as the seventh DMU in the United States and is operated by the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, or, well, BART.
It is 15 kilometers long and has three stations, one of them is not accessible from the outside world, and then it gets an unexpectedly astonishing 1,430,000 riders a year, or just short of 5,000 a day.
which is something that boggles my mind a little bit.
This works out to be 330 daily riders per kilometer, which is comparable to what we've seen so far, or a denominator effect, I am certain, 1,630 people per station per day, which just is completely incomprehensible.
Now, ebart has actually, and probably rightfully in some ways, been the punching bag of YouTube urbanists for a long time, including one of my absolute favorite YouTubers, may they rest in peace, Big Mood Energy, who said quite famously, quote, "...with the exception of the park-and-ride abomination called ebart, which I will never mention again because it should be stricken from the face of the earth." And the fact that it does get very high ridership may confuse some people as to why it gets all the hate.
But there are some serious problems, not the least of which being that incredibly unfortunate system map.
And all of this for only two new stations.
It is built at a different gauge from the BART trains, it forces a transfer, it has a separate and duplicative operations and maintenance facility, none of it is future-proofed for later BART extension, and then there's effectively no walkable urbanism at all around any of the stations.
Like, the jokes just write themselves at this point.
So this is a system we're already familiar with, seeing as we were just in the North Bay with SMART, but the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, or BART, is a broad-gauge Great Society metro that opened primarily, I believe, in the 1970s, and covers most of the Bay Area not really as a subway, but more like some sort of weird abomination of regional rail with subway-style vehicles.
Pointing in the direction of it being a regional rail, it has absolutely garbage late night and weekend service.
This is, in many instances, primarily a white people train through black people neighborhoods, and has a howl like you would not believe, even now when they supposedly quote-unquote fixed it.
But enough of my opinions on subway systems, this is about DMUs, so where's the DMU on this map? So we're looking primarily at the Contra Costa County area, which in addition to BART actually has a surprisingly good service with the Capitol Corridor, the Amtrak train that runs mostly between Oakland and Sacramento, with a few services a day going south to San Jose and only one a day going past Sacramento to Rockland and Auburn.
But between Sacramento and Oakland, this actually provides a pretty spectacular regional rail function to not just the major cities like Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Davis, and Sacramento, but also some smaller suburban communities in the vicinity of Contra Costa County, such as Richmond, Martinez, and Antioch.
And so as a result, being both effectively an intercity train as well as a local regional rail, it has actually one of the highest riderships of any Amtrak route in the entire United States, really only being beaten by, of course, the Northeast Corridor and Acela, and then also Surfliner, which is a very similar train in the Los Angeles and San Diego area.
But nonetheless, an intercity train is not local transit, and so for a long time Contra Costa County had been attempting to expand transit service into its otherwise largely and annoyingly suburban confines.
There is a current station in downtown Richmond, and I believe it is future-proofed for this three-station extension, but this seems to have never gone anywhere.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Contra Costa County, the east side, there was an East Bart extension being considered.
It was in planning since 2005, which just shows California's severe problems with bureaucracy and woke 1.0 environmental review, but finally opened over a decade later in May 2018.
For two stations.
Dear gods, the United States is doomed.
It opened as the seventh DMU in the United States and is operated by the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, or, well, BART.
It is 15 kilometers long and has three stations, one of them is not accessible from the outside world, and then it gets an unexpectedly astonishing 1,430,000 riders a year, or just short of 5,000 a day.
which is something that boggles my mind a little bit.
This works out to be 330 daily riders per kilometer, which is comparable to what we've seen so far, or a denominator effect, I am certain, 1,630 people per station per day, which just is completely incomprehensible.
Now, ebart has actually, and probably rightfully in some ways, been the punching bag of YouTube urbanists for a long time, including one of my absolute favorite YouTubers, may they rest in peace, Big Mood Energy, who said quite famously, quote, "...with the exception of the park-and-ride abomination called ebart, which I will never mention again because it should be stricken from the face of the earth." And the fact that it does get very high ridership may confuse some people as to why it gets all the hate.
But there are some serious problems, not the least of which being that incredibly unfortunate system map.
And all of this for only two new stations.
It is built at a different gauge from the BART trains, it forces a transfer, it has a separate and duplicative operations and maintenance facility, none of it is future-proofed for later BART extension, and then there's effectively no walkable urbanism at all around any of the stations.
Like, the jokes just write themselves at this point.
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