Public gets first look at defunct employee-only BART magazine

That’s because few, if any, people saw it who weren’t BART employees. BARTalk was a monthly periodical, part newsletter and part magazine, that was distributed amongst BART staff from the mid 1970s through the start of the new millennium. Its pages contain a mixture of BART-related news (updated ticket designs, new train cars, “Prime Minister rides BART”), resources for employees (tuition assistance, hotlines), event announcements (BART staff Christmas parties and picnics) and human interest stories.

“BART was really like a city on wheels, in a way,” Michael Healy, who was BART’s longtime director of public affairs, told SFGATE. 

BARTalk certainly gives this impression. It has all the trappings of a small town newspaper. BARTalk periodicals announce staff picnics, commend employees on perfect attendance and celebrate the victories of BART sports teams. (If you flip through the archived volumes of BARTalk, you can track a few of these teams from formation to dissolution.)  

Some volumes contain obituaries. More than a few share staff members’ poems, at least one of which mentions BART in its stanzas. At the end of some volumes, a small classifieds section advertises bicycles, houses and video collections for sale. 

At the time of BARTalk’s publication, BART employed approximately 3,000 employees — in the ballpark of a small city today.

In a sense, BART really was a small city — one that was split into branches of engineers, attendants and other roles, and stretched across nearly 100 miles of track in 2000.

BARTalk helped glue the organization together, firming up a center of information in a geographically distributed network of employees. The goal, in Healy’s words, was “to develop a sense of family within the organization.” He wanted to highlight employees’ talents and interests: sports, music, family. 

Other stories highlight specific BART departments. The December 1985 issue of BARTalk contains a piece titled “Documentation has the talent,” which profiles BART’s 16-member documentation team. An August 1988 article provides “A look inside BART’s training division.” 

Healy recalls working on a BARTalk article that celebrated BART employees who served in the military. His office invited employees to send in photographs of themselves in their uniforms. 

His staff were surprised when the head of finance sent a photo of herself in a Luftwaffe uniform. She was a lieutenant in the Nazi air force.

“It created a little bit of controversy,” Healy said with a laugh.

According to Healy, BARTalk emerged in the mid-’70s out of the ashes of an older BART periodical, called Inside Track, which was published occasionally. Healy worked as BART’s director of media and public affairs from the system’s inception in the early 1970s through 2005, when he retired. 

During that period, he oversaw BARTalk’s production, but the newsletter went out of print shortly after Healy retired. BART was in the process of moving its headquarters, he said, a process which likely sidetracked the publication. After BARTalk ceased production, most copies were lost. But Healy held onto his collection. 

In September, Vincent Woo, who interviewed Healy for his BART film “Tunnel Vision,” received Healy’s permission to borrow the collection. He scanned 87 volumes spanning from 1981 to 2003 and uploaded them to the Internet Archive. 

Nowadays, BART has plenty of public-facing elements: a podcast, an online news page and even a TikTok account. But none of them quite captures the gentle, familial charm of BARTalk. 

For readers who want to take a trip to the little “city on wheels,” it’s clicks away.