FREMONT -- Confusion and delays greeted BART commuters Monday along the southern stations on the Fremont line after two weekend electrical fires caused millions of dollars worth of damage that will take weeks to repair.

The explosions at BART’s South Hayward rail yard Saturday forced workers to carefully tow trains away Sunday afternoon, while passengers were shuttled to and from four East Bay BART stations.

"It has impacted some very important electronic equipment that essential is critical to making the trains move and sending them to the right locations," said BART Assistant General Manager Paul Oversier.

The damage forced BART to move 25 percent of its fleet to other maintenance yards, which will bring a slowdown in parts of the East Bay’s train service starting Monday morning and lasting into next month.

The changes primarily affect Monday commuters along the so-called “A Line,” but passengers riding from San Francisco to Fremont will not be affected.

Passengers riding from Richmond, however, will have to disembark at Bayfair and board a train from San Francisco in order to reach Fremont.

Those trains will slow from about 70 miles per hour to 25 miles per hours while traveling from Bayfair to Fremont.

"The important thing is with one service operating south of Bayfair instead of the normal two services, people need to get on the very first train that they see," said Oversier.

BART says a train will arrive every 15 minutes, but the operational slowdown comes as high gas prices have pushed more Bay Area drivers to abandon their cars for public transportation.

"There's gonna be a little bit of a problem,” said BART spokesman Linton Johnson. “I think it's gonna be worse on the Bay Bridge.”

Some BART passengers were willing to take the delays in stride.

"Manmade things, you expect things to go wrong,” said passenger Joe Warren. “And so you can't expect things to go right all the time. A lot of the time, the train has been early, which helps a lot of people. Some times it's late."

More than 18,000 people last year used the BART stations that will be affected by tomorrow’s service changes. BART says it will run long trains—eight to ten cars in length—through the San Francisco to Fremont corridor to handle large crowds.