Blue Line Derails With 30 Aboard; No One Hurt : Transit: A small piece of wire caused the train to jump the tracks. RTD official calls the incident a ‘freak accident.’

A Blue Line train bound for Long Beach jumped its tracks shortly after leaving a downtown Los Angeles station Sunday morning, but none of the 30 passengers on board were injured, transit officials said.

The accident was blamed on a 4-inch-long metal wire that lodged in a switching track, which malfunctioned and derailed the slow-moving, 42-ton train near the Pico Station at 6:45 a.m., said Paul O’Brien, rail operations superintendent for the Southern California Rapid Transit District.

In the first such incident on the $877-million line since it began operating July 14, the two-car train slipped about 4 inches off the track and continued traveling on the pavement for 20 feet before stopping just south of the Pico Station, O’Brien said.

“No one was hurt,” he said, “and everyone on board remained calm.”

The Pico Station was closed for three hours while work crews repaired the damaged switch and used a jack to place the disabled train back on the tracks, said Jim Smart, manager of the Blue Line’s news bureau.

Transit service, however, was uninterrupted as southbound passengers were shuttled by bus from the Pico Station to the Grand Station at Grand Street and Washington Boulevard, Smart said.

Bud Moore, superintendent of rail facilities, called the derailment a “freak accident.”

“This little piece of debris is an unlikely thing to fall in there,” Moore said, holding up the strand of wire he fished out of the switching track with a magnet. He said he had no idea how the strand of wire became jammed in the track.

Although the tracks are swept clean daily, Moore said transit officials can do little to prevent such debris from accumulating in tracks that cross downtown streets strewn with litter.

“The only way you could do it is to have someone watching the tracks 24 hours a day,” Moore said.

Nonetheless, Smart said transit officials planned to meet sometime this week to discuss what went wrong and how to prevent a recurrence.

“We’re going to review our procedures and if they have to be tightened up, we’ll do it,” Smart said. “This system is new and we’re all going through a learning curve here.”

Meanwhile, some prospective passengers expressed reservations about getting on the gleaming blue-and-white cars when the Pico Station was reopened.

“Jiminy Christmas, first there was a fire in the underground Metro tunnel, now this,” quipped Dick Merrill, 53, of Glendale, who was preparing to board a train. “Is there a place nearby where I can take out an insurance policy before I get on?”

Tom and Susan Young of Glendale changed their minds about taking their 9-year-old son for a ride on the train after watching work crews use crowbars and heavy wrenches to repair the switching track.

“We’re not getting on,” Susan Young said. “If we were standing up and holding our children when the train jumped the tracks, who knows what would have happened?”

“The kids would have went flying, that’s what,” answered her husband.

Smart said passengers on the derailed train, however, were never in danger because it was only moving about 10 m.p.h. when it jumped the tracks.

Beyond that, Smart said, “We’ve carried 300,000 people since July 14 and no one has been hurt.

“We believe the trains are safe and all difficulties that we encounter will be resolved to keep them that way,” he said.

The 19-mile line linking downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach is offering free rides until the end of the month to attract riders.