These Blue Line Riders Still See Red : Transit: They fondly remember the days of the Red Car, when Los Angeles--and they--were young.

The Blue Line may be an air-conditioned technological wonder, but it was having a tough time wrestling with the ghost of the Red Cars on Saturday as riders of Los Angeles’ old transit system turned out to size up its new one.

Finding someone to malign Mother Teresa might have been easier than eliciting a disparaging word about the old Pacific Electric Red Car that took its last mournful trip from Los Angeles to Long Beach, black flags waving, on April 9, 1961.

The trains clacked like thunder and the conductor had to throw sand on the tracks for traction.

But memories were selective as Los Angeles residents fondly recalled a line where servicemen slept, riders fell in love and 34 cents would get you to the Santa Anita race track. It was more than another transit line, it was another time.

“A guy could go on there and go to sleep and nobody would rob you. Someone in the crowd would always wake you up to tell you when your stop was coming,” said Tony Merriweather, who rode the Los Angeles-Long Beach route as an 18-year-old sailor in 1948. “Today, you can’t speak to people. I drive by people all the time with their car doors half open and babies hanging out and you honk and they just speed up. Nobody talks to you.”

It’s been 29 years since the last Red Car left Los Angeles with 50 people on board at 1 a.m. that April day in 1961.

“The passengers sang ‘I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad’ and we arrived in Long Beach in the wee hours of the morning,” said Alan Fishel, a transit buff who took the last ride at the age of 19 and waited in the heat Saturday for the debut of the Metro Blue Line. “We set out flares and watched the train roll away through the smoke and into the dawn. People cried, they really did.”

A few cars went to the museum; Los Angeles dove into its love affair with the automobile, and the Red Car faded from the public’s memory. Lately, however, thousands of loyal followers have emerged with as many theories about the demise of what once was considered the nation’s finest rail system.

“I was real mad when they took away my Red Car,” Bellflower resident Gene Bird grumbled. “And I know who did it--Firestone tires, Standard Oil and General Motors. I’ve been buying Fords ever since.”

“It was the stupid Times Mirror Co.,” said Ruby Deem of Alhambra, who used to ride the line to work at the phone company. Today, her old stop is a BMW dealership. “They never wrote a good word about the Red Car and that was the best system in the whole wide world.”

At 6:15 a.m. on July 4, 1902, 30,000 people came to town on horseback, bicycle and foot to see the Red Car take off from Los Angeles to Long Beach.

On Saturday, almost 88 years later to the date, tens of thousands braved scorching heat, their heads covered with towels and handkerchiefs, to welcome not only the new Blue Line but the end of a Los Angeles transit standstill three decades long.

The new line, like the old, runs from Los Angeles to Long Beach. And that, riders concluded, is where most similarities end.

“This has more buttons than a 747,” said Jim Deem, a former Red Car motorman who drove a Pasadena line in 1946 and sat for a moment behind the wheel of one of the sleek blue-and-white trains.

The old trains were equipped with an air brake handle, an accelerator, a lever to spit sand on the tracks and a “dead man’s switch” that stopped the car if the driver dropped dead. Untimely death and kids throwing rocks were about all the dangers Red Car drivers ever considered, Deem said.

The Blue Line trains, on the other hand, are coated to resist graffiti, equipped with special alarm systems, patrolled by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and hooked up to a cement and glass command post known as the “USS Enterprise.”

Minimum fare on a Red Car was 10 cents, and provisions for senior citizens and the disabled weren’t even considered. On the Blue Line, it’s $1.10; seniors ride for half-fare and the blind ride free.

The red line rolled through orange groves and alfalfa fields. The blue one offers a sobering view of some of the poorest neighborhoods.

The old line was part of 1,100 miles of track that traversed four counties with access to the mountains and the sea. The Blue Line is the first leg of a system that, once finished, will stretch 150 miles--paltry by comparison, most riders agreed.

“The Blue Line will never replace the Red Car and all the memories it holds for me,” said Merriweather, now an instructor supervisor for the Southern California Rapid Transit District, which runs the new rail. “The seats might be more comfortable now, but it was the clackety clack of the Red Car tracks that put me to sleep.”

Reminiscence aside, Red Car loyalists vowed to ride the new line.

“Absolutely,” said Gene Bird. “My nerves can’t take the traffic. And the air--I used to wake up in L.A. and see the clear blue skies and it felt good to be alive. Now, you feel like you’re ready to let someone lay you down and bury you. It’s been a long time coming.”