SAN FRANCISCO, March 17 (UPI) -- A year-old metal yoke that couples rail cars broke, causing nine cars of a San Francisco BART train to separate, snarling the commute, officials say.
The yoke assembly -- part of a mechanical device that links the cars together -- snapped about 6:23 a.m. PDT Tuesday as the train was about to enter Embarcadero Station from the west end of the Transbay Tube. An automatic braking system was employed, bringing the cars to a stop approximately 70 feet apart, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday.
"A metal bar that isn't supposed to break, that's supposed to last a lifetime, broke somehow," BART spokesman Linton Johnson said.
The broken part has been rushed to a laboratory for metallurgical analysis but BART officials say they don't have plans to inspect the approximately 1,168 similar yokes on the agency's 669-car fleet, the newspaper said.
"There's no reason to believe we have a safety problem," Paul Oversier, BART's deputy general manager for operations, said. "And if we were to inspect right now, we wouldn't know what to look for."
There were delays of up to 40 minutes throughout the morning commute.
"It was not at all good for customers," Oversier said.
