BART’s new Warm Springs Station to be closed the next 2 weekends

Riders and the Warm Springs BART station on first day of service, Saturday, March 25, 2017 in Fremont, CA. Riders and the Warm Springs BART station on first day of service, Saturday, March 25, 2017 in Fremont, CA. Photo: Eric Kayne, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Eric Kayne, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close BART’s new Warm Springs Station to be closed the next 2 weekends 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

BART’s newest station — Warm Springs/South Fremont — will shut down this weekend and next so crews can work on extending the rail system to two even newer stations under construction in Milpitas and east San Jose.

Service to Warm Springs, which opened in March, will shut down early Saturday when BART’s regular Friday schedule ends. It will resume at 4 a.m. Monday.

“We know it’s an inconvenience for folks, and we apologize for that,” said Chris Filippi, a BART spokesman.

While the station is closed, workers will install and test train control software that will enable BART and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which is building the 10-mile extension, to test train operations south of Warm Springs.

“Right now Warm Springs is functioning as an end-of-the-line station,” Filippi said. “We need to allow it to function as a middle-of-the-line station and allow the train control systems (on the current BART system and the extension) to communicate with each other.”

During the weekend closures, BART officials advise riders planning to board or get off at Warm Springs to use Fremont Station instead. A free connecting bus service will be available to anyone who cannot make the switch. Buses are scheduled to depart Warm Springs every 20 minutes and will add 20 to 30 minutes to a trip.

The number of BART passengers affected by the shutdown is relatively small. About 1,275 people used Warm Springs Station on an average Saturday in August, and 826 use it on a typical Sunday, according to BART ridership figures.

The $2.3 billion extension includes 10 miles of tracks and two stations, in Milpitas near the Great Mall and in Berryessa, a neighborhood in East San Jose. New riders are expected to flock to the new line, with 20,000 new passengers predicted at Milpitas and 25,000 at Berryessa by 2030.

While plans for the extension called for a June 2018 opening, VTA officials had boasted as recently as this spring that trains would be running to the new stations by the end of this year.

But last month, they acknowledged that while construction is nearly complete, testing will take months longer, and they reverted to the original prediction. VTA needs to complete tests, then hand the system over to BART, which will connect it to its system and run its own tests. Finally, the state Public Utilities Commission needs to certify the system.

When that happens, BART will begin serving a new county — its fifth — for the first time since 1973, when the tracks reached Daly City in San Mateo County. The VTA is building and, with the state and federal government, paying for the extension, which it will pay BART to operate.

The Silicon Valley extension is the first phase of a plan to eventually take BART beneath downtown San Jose and into Santa Clara. Planning for that phase is continuing while regional transportation officials struggle to find the nearly $5 billion needed for construction.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan

Warm Springs BART closure

For more information on the weekend shutdowns: http://bit.ly/2xkSciJ