Ha ha! Got you in here. There's nothing exposed here today. Besides, doing so in public could get me arrested. This is just a quick look at my trip today on the Expo Line, L.A. Metro's newest light rail line. It was just an innocent play on words. Get it? Well, don't feel bad. No one at my house laughed either.
Having been a longtime fan of public transit, it only makes sense to write about it once in awhile. And what better place to do so than at Eric's Planet? With an overflowing fanbase of 12 faithful readers, I have to keep things jumping around here.
When I reached North Hollywood, I parked in the Metro parking lot close to the entrance to the Red Line. Going into the station is a long, lonnng, lonnnnnng ride down as you can see in this picture. In fact, it's so far down that it's still nighttime in there:
After purchasing a Metro day pass for the bargain price of $5, I headed down to get on the Red Line train that would take me into downtown L.A. (No sarcasm here. $5 really is a bargain for all-day transportation, and in many cases, free entertainment.) Normally, I'd have taken a picture or two of this part of my trip, but with a few scary looking folks on the train, I chose to...do that another time. However, I did take a picture inside the tunnel. (Note that I refuse to use the term "pic" because I despise that term and most of the other grammatical "shortcuts" that people are using these days.)
As you can see, there isn't much of interest in the tunnel, so I won't take any more shots like this.
Upon reaching the 7th St./Metro Center station, I got off the Red Line train and went upstairs to where the Blue and Expo Line trains board. For the first time that I ever saw, they were using both tracks for boarding and/or disembarking. Normally only the track on the west side of the station is used, but now with twice as many trains, they're going to have to use both sides or play musical trains or something.
There was a bit of confusion today, as some trains destined for "Long Beach" were in fact Expo Line trains destined for "La Cienega," and vice versa. All I could do was to cross my fingers and hope that whichever train I got on was in fact headed toward La Cienega. The Metro people stationed on the platforms were very helpful in directing people to mislabeled trains. Sure enough, the train I boarded kept going down Flower St. past where the Blue Line tracks split at Washington Blvd. I knew then that I was going to La Cienega and that everything was going to be all right.
Never having ridden on this line before, I saw a lot of new things. This line takes you right past the USC campus, the Natural History Museum, the Science and Industry Museum, and a restaurant that advertised something called "HILI" on its sign. (I suspect that a letter was missing, but I didn't make the train stop so I could go find out. A lot of folks would have given me a 'hili reception when I got back...)
Here's a shot of the La Cienega station. They were smart to put it up on top of that bridge. Putting it in the middle of the street would not have been safe, and traffic would be tied up for hours longer than it already is. For the rail nerds among you, this train was built by Nippon-Sharyo in Japan. This was a three-car train, though in this picture you can only see two of them.
A train is approaching. The destination sign says "TEST TRAIN," but it was real. I pinched it. But I did wait till it stopped, just to be safe. NERD FACT: This train was built by Siemens and was also a three-car train like the one shown above.
On my way back to L.A., I took note of this sign that Metro has posted on many of its trains.
In the smaller picture, some thug is painting the train window, causing the meek, mild-mannered guy in the seat behind him tremendous distress, noted nicely by the exclamation point. (By the way, I like how they put a backwards ball cap on the tagger, you know, like all vandals wear!) Next, the thug has vanished and the meek, mild-mannered guy has whipped out his cell phone to contact Metro and let them know what he saw. One thing about this sign: some Metro trains run up to 120 feet underground where cell phone reception is all but nonexistent.
I managed to get back to 7th St./Metro Center station in one piece and boarded a rather crowded Red Line train for North Hollywood. But crowded is all there ever is, so I made do. Of course, it's hard to leave North Hollywood without stopping at Henry's for something to eat. This time, I didn't eat there, but got a combo burrito to take home for dinner. And for a change, this time I parked on the shadeward side of Henry's.
Another adventure in the can, as they would say in Hollywood. Next Saturday (May 12) is Amtrak's National Train Day, and I plan to attend. If I can, I'll do a report on that event.
