Despite being one of the first Los Angeles writers to crusade for trains throughout the '70s and '80s as the only way to halt the choking advance of automobile gridlock and bring rapid transit to town, I have to admit it was only last weekend I actually set out to go to go someplace by train.

This is an embarrassing admission, to be sure.

You see, my wife and I decided we would go to Pasadena's Old Town by train -- even though we live only a short distance away by car on the Golden State and Ventura freeways.

Boryana, who is from Varna, a town on the Black Sea in Bulgaria, wanted to explore the new city she lives in. She also figured going by train would give us both adventure and some badly needed exercise. She had recently gotten on a bus in Los Feliz to go to the Beverly Center, and discovered that the city looked entirely different by bus than by car.

She said it was more interesting, more like a real city.

So grumbling as I'm wont to do as we got on the subway to Union Station, to catch the Gold line to Pasadena, I proudly boasted how I felt as if I were partly responsible for Los Angeles finally getting trains. I explained that trains in L.A. are recent -- if you forget the old trolleys and street cars from before World War II.

Trains are what makes the difference being "mass" transit by buses, and real rapid transit, which is only possible by trains. Also, only "rapid transit" is the way to get people out of their cars. Busses will never do it.

I rode the Red Line when the first section opened in 1993. But then I never went anywhere in Los Angeles again by train, unless you count the numerous times I pulled into Union Station on the last leg of the Amtrak Starlight from Glendale.

I've always been a train lover, and not only because of my name. Back in 1964, for example, I rode the last mail train, old 151, from Los Angeles to Pismo Beach. Some years later I wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times about riding the Amtrak Starlight from Los Angeles to Redding, explaining that Amtrak was set up in such a way the private railroads were allowed to give their freight trains priority over passengers trains, which defies commonsense. Unless you actually want passenger service to fail. Amtrak still is not given priority in running its passenger trains, even though the agency pays a considerable amount to the private railroads to use their mostly poorly maintained tracks.

Then when there was the first effort to get rapid transit going in the mid-'70s, I wrote about that. In 1979 I wrote in the old Los Angeles Reader a piece called "Blood on the Amtrak" about how the enemies of trains -- basically the oil companies and the compliant politicians they ran -- were trying to get rid of passenger trains.

I was particularly proud of the way I described the physics of why trains are inherently the most fuel efficient way to move goods and people in that article. It has to do with the fact that there is minimum friction between a flanged train wheel and a track -- a width of no more than a dime's width of steel on steel, compared to a wide rubber tire on concrete, which is the common denominator of buses, trucks and cars.

The following year, 1980, I interviewed County Supervisor Baxter Ward, who was the first and only politician who realized the need of bringing back the rails as the best way to move people around Southern California. It was Ward -- often derided by his many critics as "Choo Choo Baxter" -- who explained to me that building trains underground was safer and better than building trains overground.

Nine years later his point was proven in San Francisco, when BART -- Bay Area Rapid Transit -- became the only way folks could get from Berkeley and Oakland across the bay to the City. While the freeways were down and the Bay Bridge unusable because of the earthquake, BART's subway at the bottom of the ocean floor got people to their destination. BART didn't really become a success until then.

I had always regarded trains as the only civilized way to travel -- I first fell in love with passenger trains when I was 12 years old, which was in the early '50s, and my parents would put me on the old Southern Pacific Daylight to ride from Los Angeles to visit my grandparents in Los Gatos.

But it wasn't until I spent a year in London I discovered the true meaning of freedom -- freedom from automobiles. I went everywhere by The Tube in London. You could get within a few walkable blocks of most places in the city by train. Buses were used primarily to feed into the trains -- the only logical use of buses in a real rapid (as opposed to mass) transit system.

So as we rode the Gold Line to Pasadena, after getting off the Red Line subway at Union Station, I looked out at the residential streets of Highland Park flashing by perpendicular to the tracks, and felt as if I were back in London.

We strolled along Colorado Boulevard, and made a quick detour to Castle Green, and then got back on the Gold Line and to the subway again. At one stop a group of boisterous sports fans of one type or another came aboard. Boryana was a little scared of them. I said they looked very calm compared to the drunken and more than boisterous soccer hooligans I saw getting on the tube one day in London.

That's the disadvantage of public transit, for sure. It's public. You can't get all hermetically sealed like you do in a car. But then you don't feel the city, either.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lionel Rolfe is the author of "The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather" and "Literary L.A."

Photo by Boyd Lewis

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