BART on Wednesday unveiled a new, state-of-the-art system for inspecting tracks that it says will enable the transit agency to find and fix problems faster.
BART says the new, $10 million rail inspection vehicle, or RIV, was federally funded and is completely custom built, one of only two in the U.S.
The purpose of the vehicle is basically to look for any problems on the trackway so they can be fixed before service is impacted.
The vehicle aparently does its job very fast, traveling at about 70 mph, and is equipped with high technology.
It has 3-D surface scans of the trackway, high-definition pictures of the track components, the imagery detects abnormalities and all the while it has a GPS, axle counters, it's capturing all kinds of data as it travels along the trackway," according to a BART spokesperson.
BART says it has been testing the inspection vehicle for over a year and will be putting it into service soon. But its typical operation hours are when riders are not on the tracks.
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