That last line that went belly-up in 1961 must have been the one my dad talked about. He said he took a special trip to ride this trolley on it’s last day. I thought he said it was in the early 60s. He took pictures of it (which he would pull out and show the family now and then) and he kept the ticket stub. Years later, when San Diego put in it’s red car rail system, my dad made a special trip down there to ride them. (Sure, he said he wanted to go down there to see San Diego, and visit Mexico, but we all knew the truth! He just wanted to ride the rails down there!)
A few years before his death, I found a “train geek” (i.e. “Model Train”) store in Pasadena. I got all sorts of goodies for my dad, including many books with pictures of old street cars and cable cars, and videos of street cars and cable cars. Yep, those were exciting videos - watching some old scratchy 20 minute film of an old street car doing it’s route around L.A.! Yipee! But it made him SO happy.
Pardon me for the sligh hijack there…oh - one more thing–anyone remember Angel’s Flight? The original one? After the last Red Car was removed in 1961, the only “railed” thing in L.A. seemed to be Angel’s Flight. They took it out in 1969. I remember my dad took me on a special trip to ride on it right before it was removed. I was pretty little, but he made such a big deal of it, I remembered it. It was pretty nifty. Here’s an URL with more information about it: http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/la/historic/angels_flight.html
Last I heard, there was some controversy over whether it was worthwhile to continue expanding LA’s meager subway milage or investing the money elsewhere. Are there still plans/ongoing work to expand it? Out to the airport, maybe?
Complete aside about Amtrak… There’s no continuous passenger rail running from SF to LA. If you want to take rail, you also have to take buses, so it’ll take about 12 hours. Does anyone else think this is stupid?
“Complete aside about Amtrak… There’s no continuous passenger rail running from SF to LA. If you want to take rail, you also have to take buses, so it’ll take about 12 hours. Does anyone else think this is stupid?”
Amtrak and California DOT are planning in the next two to three years to implement a daily “Coast Daylight” from San Francisco – presumably the CalTrain terminal – to Los Angeles. http://www.amtrakwest.com/califuture/5yearplan.htm# No five-year-plan jokes, please.
There is a planned extension of the Blue Line, an at-grade light rail system. It will go north from Union Station up through the Pasadena area. For political reasons, it is not being constructed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who built all the other rail projects.
The Green Line, which goes almost, but not quite, to the airport doesn’t have any extension plans that I know of. You can take a shuttle bus from the end of the Green Line to LAX. I believe that LAX didn’t want to have the Green Line extend into its territory. The reason for that is hard to discern.
Actually the Green Line, which runs from Norwalk to Redondo Beach (basically an east-west line throught the southern part of the city), does stop about a mile from the airport
and the MTA does run a free bus from the station. Except this week, of course. But you can see at the Metro station
how they were going to run a spur track directly to the airport, but the rail bed just stops. They ran out of money.
Actually the light rail lines have proven to be fairly successful, far cheaper than subways, and newer model
cars can go as fast as the subway.
Oops, never actually addressed you question. Yes there is talk of running another line from Union Station to Pasadena,
and a line out to East L.A. Both would be light rail, since
a recently approved voter initiative prohibits any further
subway construction. I’m sure the Bus Riders Union will try to stop those but they’ll probably go forward nonetheless.
