Bar Codes

I noticed a few weeks ago at South Station big vertical bar codes above the pit. What purpose do these serve?

Huh?!? On the Red Line or Commuter Rail/Amtrak?

Are they on the station or the cars? If the station, where in the station?

I've been wondering about this as well. They are on the Red Line, attached to the pillars between the tracks, on the face of the pillar perpendicular to the tracks. The code seems to extend just about the entire height of the train.

My only hypothesis is that they have something to do with a monitoring system for the Big Dig construction that might have going on nearby, but this is only a guess and doesn't really make sense to me either.

Don't recall anything of the sort. Unfortunatly my few Red Line So. St Station photos(taken just a few days ago) have the train in it, so I can't see what you're talking about.

They have been present for quite some time. I recall seeing them as far back as 2002.

Never noticed that, though I have seen barcodes sometimes on pieces of rail. Guess that would be an inventory control issue.

With the understanding that the BigDig is almost over and the Red Line had a lot of precarious tunneling projects under, over and around it, I recently downloaded the Discovery Channel's Modern Marvels - Boston's Big Dig.
According to this documentary on the Big Dig, they stated that when they were working on Fort Point Channel, they realized one nudge of the Red Line tunnel could cause Boston Harbor to flood into the Red Line and flood downtown Boston in what would be a catastophe. In order to avert this possibility, they installed a water tight door on the Red Line Tunnel that would shut and seal if an emergency occurred. Has anyone ever seen this tunnel-sealing door? Is it on the DTC end of South Station or the Broadway side of it? And I can imagine if it does exist, what kind of relays it would have to have in place to auto-shutdown the third rail to allow this device to straddle both sets of third rails AND the regular track. Did it happen or is this statement in the documentary just a piece of fiction?

Yes, I've seen those tunnel shut off doors, I've seen them from both ends, although it's nothing like the BART's trans-bay tube, which is prone to earthquakes, those have doors too, and they have doors in between those tubes under SF Bay in the event of an earthquake. I've been thru that tunnel, and I was a bit scared!

I thought Modern Marvels airs on the History Channel. Anyways, I too saw a show once about the Big Dig. Knowing the MBTA, the doors probably do exist, but are nonfuctional, or they simply don't exist. The doors are probably designed to go over the track, but they don't seal off the area from the top of the track to the floor(the bottom, where the track is attached to, what ever you call it). So if the tunnel does flood, only a small amount can come through at a time.

*edit* Oh darn, Robert beat me to it. Better type faster next time.

I know that the animation they used for the documentary showed the door hinged just like a regular door, and maybe the leakage from under the tracks would be controllable considering the fact they could sandbag or pump a certain amount thru floor drains which I have seen in many stations throughout the systems, but like AZ said, do they exist or maybe the T does what they love to do best, start something and NEVER finish it... you fill in the blank: ________ (Silverline, etc)