Your description of Los Angeles Union Station is similar to my experience during my stopover while on an Amtrak Southern Rail Experience circle tour this past summer. I did have better luck with the Gold Line and did well with Metrolink suburban trains with two consists doubled up on some tracks. Platform access was not a problem.
Friday, April 14. This was the first day after the completion of the trackwork on the Gold line, and I hoped service would be back to normal, which meant base headways of every 12 minutes, increased to 7 for rush hours–and it turned out operations were indeed trouble free on this beautiful day. After adding a new day ticket to my TAP card I followed the same itinerary that I tried two days earlier, and found myself at Union Station before 10:00. I boarded a two-car train of new Kinkisharyo cars and rode it all the way to the terminal just beyond Azusa (49 minutes), which gave me the opportunity to plan my photography of the extension from Sierra Madre. The ride was speedy and smooth, and gave me a full appreciation of the line’s ambience.
This side of the Gold line continues to be my favorite Metro light rail route for a number of reasons, but mostly because of its varied and attractive rights-of-way, which are now augmented by this extension. When I joined the hobby in the late 1950s and widened my horizons, I quickly learned that the electric streetcar (and its evolutionary followers) was the most flexible mode of transit, able to take advantage of all sorts of infrastructure, including streets, reservations in the center and side of roads, cross-country through fields and woods, elevated, underground, and so on, and able to share rights-of-way with motor traffic as well as full-sized railways, both alongside and even on the same tracks.
Here is my attempt at describing this most interesting line. With its platform elevated at Union Station, the line climbs further on high concrete pillars to Chinatown station, whose architecture and decorations are styled accordingly, and which affords a panoramic view of the city. It then sinks to ground level, crosses the Los Angeles River and joins the former right-of-way
Two views at Azusa Station:
Above Breda inbound at Azusa, below KinkeSharo, brand new, outbound. The multi-retail Target store is a traffc generator. The wide RoW inlcudes a track for freight.
Duarte, location of a famous hotpital for concert treatment:
Old AT&AF stationi at Duarte, to becaome care, sign for conversion
Two views from the top of the garage ajacent ot Arcadia Station:
Outbound nearing South Pasadena
Here are some additional photos I took in Los Angeles.
For the most part, the last group comes from late in the day, Friday, April 14, after I came back from riding the Gold line to Azusa and realized I still had some additional time for photography. I covered the combined Blue and Expo line trackage leading from the subway portal toward the junction of the two routes, and then slightly further. During the previous days I saw few Siemens units on the Expo line and none at all on the Gold line, so almost all of the photos reproduced in the first 3 sections of this report were of Kinkisharyo, Breda and Nippon Sharyo cars. I suspect most of the service on the Green line, which I didn’t get to ride on this trip, is provided by the Siemens cars, and in addition, I saw some of them out for the rush hour on the Blue line. As for the Breda cars, there were a large number of photos of them running on the Gold line in part 3.
But first . . . a look at both ends of the Expo/USC station, which I finally got around to photographing.
Above and below: Expo line trains consisting of Kinkisharyo cars are shown in the vicinity of Exposition Park in both photos. &
Dave, on your last post, your photos are icons that I can’t open on Google. Your previous post’s photos were fine.
When I reach a wide-band sever on Sunday or Monday, I will try and post the photoa from my hard drive via Imgur.
This posting is an experimeriment. If it works I may not need Imgur, but will require one posing for each picture.
Seems to have worked for me. Does it for you?