BLUE LINE JOURNAL : For Some Early Riders, the Past Is Prologue

It was well before dawn. The streets of downtown Long Beach were mostly deserted, but Jed Hughes was already in line--half an hour early--to meet the train. The line was short, just three people. They stood on a raised, rather desolate boarding platform in the center median of Long Beach Boulevard, just waiting.

Hughes was excited. He had been planning for months to be on the first Monday morning Blue Line train from Long Beach to Los Angeles, a train that would usher in a new era in commuting. He already had walked a mile, leaving his condominium at 4:30 a.m., to be sure of making the 5:30 departure time.

“I’m riding, really, for historic purposes,” the 52-year-old workers’ compensation specialist said. “I was on the last Red Car (train) coming into Long Beach in 1961. I’m very pleased to see it come back.”

In the 29 years since he rode that final, crowded Pacific Red Car line one late April night, Hughes has been through college, a failed marriage and has raised three children to adulthood. Now, thinner of hair and thicker in the middle, he stepped aboard a quieter, smoother train--a Japanese-built train--and turned back the clock.

The 5:30 train departed without fanfare or difficulty. Scarcely two dozen passengers were aboard, several of them train buffs like Hughes, wanting to be a part of history. James Washington, a 40-year-old librarian, was one. He brought along his camera and asked another rider to photograph him in his window seat.

“I had to be in on the experience,” he said, recalling his own rides on the Red Car as a grade-schooler. For the trains to come back was “almost a lifetime wait,” he said.

Immediately after the train rolled north across Anaheim Street toward Watts and South-Central Los Angeles, passengers became acquainted with the train horn--as harsh and incessant as an angry goose. It blasted at every intersection. James Strong, a civil engineer with Southern Pacific Railroad, which helped to create the Blue Line, settled into a seat just behind the driver’s control room and smiled with satisfaction.

He, too, had ridden the old Red Cars. This was much smoother. He did have one complaint: “I don’t like the horn, though--it’s awful.”

Passengers trickled aboard at each station. After the sixth stop, at Compton, the first car was nearly full. Bob Davis, 50, of San Gabriel, took a seat facing the aisle, having driven half an hour just to take the junket, which is free through the end of the month.

“I’m a rail fan,” Davis declared. “It has a kind of Chicago feeling--a lot of elevated sections. I was in Chicago last year. If this can work half as well as Chicago, it’ll be doing great.”

Davis reminisced about his childhood in Monrovia when “the ancestors of these trains went practically through my bedroom.” As he spoke, a flash appeared in the window. “Oh, my goodness! A freight train!” And he paused to watch it pass on its way south.

Most of the passengers traveled in silence, several of them reading newspapers-- a la subway commuters of New York--or studying train schedules. Compton resident Bernard Strickland, 37, an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service, listened to the rhythms of a stereo headphone as he pored over a route map. His plan: Disembark at 103rd Street and catch a bus to West Los Angeles. If he drives, he said, he can get there in an hour and 15 minutes. But he would be happy to get there 15 minutes later if he could get away from freeways.

“My first audit is at 8:15,” Strickland said, tucking the map away. He was expecting to arrive in a good mood. “So far,” the IRS man said, “it’s working out well. I have great expectations.”

The landscape drew occasional criticism: Out the wide view windows lay seemingly nothing but graffiti-covered warehouses and liquor stores, trash-strewn yards and boarded-up shops. The station stops were quick--about a minute each--and the 55-minute trip downtown seemed to pass quickly, several passengers remarked.

Trains became more crowded as the morning went on. Hurrying to make the 7:35 train, 86-year-old Ethel Smith tripped and fell on the tracks in the middle of Long Beach Boulevard, cutting her hand and knee. She lay for a moment in the path of a stationary train before she was helped up by Blue Line officials and escorted aboard.

“I was hurrying and I didn’t step up when I should have,” she explained. She was on her way to a child-development center where she works five days a week. She had walked more than seven blocks to reach the train, hoping it would shave more than an hour off her daily two-hour bus trip.

Wheelchair passenger Wally Berryman was aboard a packed train at 10:30 a.m., heading downtown to shop.

“They didn’t overlook anything,” he said happily. “A person in a wheelchair can accept a job in Los Angeles now. Nothing can go any smoother than this.”