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BART Plans Weekend Closures Between Glen Park And Daly City To Repair Old, 'Screechy' Track

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) -- This weekend BART is shutting down service between Glen Park in San Francisco and Daly City which includes a notoriously noisy stretch of track known as the Balboa Curve. Balboa Park Station will be closed.

"We will have express buses that will run from Glen Park directly to Daly City," BART spokesman Jim Allison said.

If you have a flight to catch at SFO, give yourself an extra hour of travel time, he suggested.

The closure allows the transit agency to make its trains more reliable and safer. One of the bonus benefits of the scheduled repairs will be to reduce the noise trains make while traveling the Balboa Curve.

Linda Auerbach lives next to the rail line.

"It gets annoying and it also gets a little bit scary because the house shakes when a train goes by," she said.

"I live, like five, six, seven blocks from here and you can hear the screech," Roberto Lavato said.

Riders get an earful too.

"If you're talking to someone, you won't be able to hear what they're saying," BART passenger Augustina Miano said.

Allison said the curved section of track contains "a half-mile that has some of the original rail when it was put in and it's not up to full functionality."

"What we're going to do is replace some of the rail, we're going to grind some of the existing rail that will stay in place to make it quieter," he added.

BART estimates the repair work will affect about 40,000 people.

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