“I like trains.”
– asdfmovie

Conventions can be held anywhere if you set your heart to it. Obviously, they’re prominently held at convention centers; here in San Jose, the downtown McEnery Convention Center hosts a swath of them like FanimeCon, OffKai Expo, and so on. Smaller ones are often at fairgrounds, hotels, shopping malls, college campuses, and so on. There are even some in museums like Bowling Green Anime-Fest at the National Corvette Museum and ValleyCon at Fargo Air Museum. Our personal favorites? Carrier Con on the USS Hornet and Richmond Raceway’s Anime Richmond and VA ComiCon.

But how about a light rail station?

Bay Area Rapid Transit is the primary rail network in the San Francisco Bay Area. It often works alongside the Valley Transportation Authority, who oversees the region’s public transit in general like light rail and buses.

The Bay Area is also pretty big into anime, if the myriad of conventions didn’t make it obvious. Hoping to tap into this market, BART debuted anime mascots in 2023 and have become a regular booth at cons like Fanime and OffKai.

In September, they decided to step things up a bit. It’d been about two months since Anime Impulse in Santa Clara while YumeCon wouldn’t be until November, so there was a bit of a quiet period for anime-specific conventions as the season changed.

Thus, the Let’s Glow! BART Anime Festival was born. It was held on September 6 and free of charge.

It wasn’t meant to be a full-fledged con and is more akin to a night market or block party held in a single afternoon, but the thing that made it stand out was location. Understandably, the festival doubled as an advertisement for BART, and what better way to do that than to get everyone to gather at one of their locations?

The Warm Springs–South Fremont station is located in one of the area’s major tech hubs and Tesla’s factory a stone’s throw away (so much so that Tesla employees aren’t allowed to park there). With Saturday afternoon being fairly quiet as everyone is at home, BART pulled out the stops to turn it into a convention ground.

The parking lot where buses come and go were converted into Artist Alley and itasha car show space, the former on one side and the latter on the other. The surrounding area leading into the terminal became the main base for con ops, tables for groups and clubs that BART analogized to a club fair, and a stage for DJing and wotagei (there was even a class for the latter near the underpass). The accompanying curbs were filled with food trucks.

Trains still operated as usual.

The thought of a train station (well, BART station if you want to be pedantic) hosting such a big event sounds interesting on paper. Major transportation hubs are obviously built to accommodate large crowds of commuters, and there certainly was space for a small-time con.

However, that space might not have been used to its fullest potential. The Artist Alley was condensed into two rows bunched into a single bus stop lane, leading to tight crowds and a long line. If you wanted to browse, you were basically on an assembly line that occasionally stopped and restarted. It seemed if BART had underestimated the amount of attendees (over 4,500 in total), which is probably understandable given this was their first time organizing such an event and that it was only supposed to run for barely four hours.

True to 131 Off-Road‘s mission, our interest was naturally piqued in the cars. Most of the vehicles on display are recurring faces at San Jose cons, having previously appeared at FanimeCon’s car show and indoors at OffKai Expo and Anime Impulse. Returning faces included a Subaru WRX STi with a livery themed after Yoshiko/Yohane from Love Live!, and more pertinently a Hyundai Santa Cruz with Leona from League of Legends that’s competed in the California Rallycross Association.

As the sun set, the penlights came out. The stage was of particular interest as night fell and various DJs played remixes of anime and K-pop, eventually leading to a wotagei performance of “Ai Scream!” by SanFlare.

Just past 8:30 PM, it came to an end with everyone coalescing around the DJ for the Max Coveri classic “Running in the 90’s”. It wasn’t the only eurobeat or Initial D song to play in the late hours as Manuel’s “Gas Gas Gas” led to a pseudo-conga line with one guy riding a shopping cart.

Despite its flaws, it was frankly a solid first try for BART. Well played.

Featured image credit: Justin Nguyen