Traffic Cuts Dangerous Path Across the Blue Line : Transportation: Accidents occur despite warning signals. Officials may try temporary safety measures.

It was just 17 hours after a mother and her 4-year-old son had died trying to drive around a Blue Line trolley, and engineer Joe Rocque could not believe what he saw on the tracks ahead at the same South-Central Los Angeles intersection: A maroon sedan, frozen in place.

After repeated blasts on his horn, Rocque hit the brakes and his train squealed to a stop a safe distance from the automobile. He glared and shook his head.

“Can you believe it?” he muttered. “Two people dead and here’s another one. They get caught here all the time.”

Within 12 hours between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Blue Line trains were involved in two collisions with cars trying to maneuver through gated crossings, heightening concerns about the safety of intersections along the region’s new trolley system.

RTD officials, transit union leaders and engineers said that in the line’s three months of operation, its 22 miles of track have become an urban obstacle course, dangerously obstructed each day by cars and bicycles that try to slip through closed railroad crossings and pedestrians who scramble over the tracks.

Late Thursday, Los Angeles County Rail Commission officials said they would meet today to address temporary safety measures to guard against additional crossing accidents.

Norman Jester, vice president of operations overseeing the Blue Line, cautioned, however, that any safety measures would have to “be consistent throughout the system,” meaning that the intersection security could prove to be a vexing problem for the fledgling system.

“Our ridership couldn’t be better,” said Southern California Rapid Transit District spokesman Greg Davy, referring to weekday averages of 17,000 Blue Line riders and weekend averages of 19,000--far above earlier projections of 7,000 daily riders. “But we could have a better safety record.”

Davy said that on a single run between Los Angeles and Long Beach, engineers have spotted as many as six cars speeding through crossings or trapped between the guard rails. Engineer Rocque said he normally has to slow for at least four illegal crossings on each of his Los Angeles-to-Long Beach runs.

The crash late Wednesday killed Graciela Marinero, 26, of Los Angeles and her son, Willie Torres, at the crossing near 41st Street and Long Beach Avenue. A second incident early Thursday slightly injured four occupants of a car as it crossed at Long Beach Boulevard near the Burnett Street station, authorities said.

The two collisions were the latest in a spate of Blue Line accidents over the past three months. A youth lost several toes on July 30 when a train ran over his foot as he played on tracks near downtown, a Watts woman was struck and killed Sept. 19 by a high-speed trolley as she crossed Blue Line tracks near her home, and on Oct. 3 a train rammed a car trying to cross illegally, seriously injuring the driver.

One engineer, Narciso Polanco, was forced to slow his Blue Line train Thursday afternoon just south of downtown Los Angeles because a van and a car sat parked on the tracks. Polanco, rising out of his seat to gesture at the absurdity of the situation, lost nearly a minute while the drivers moved their vehicles.

“Amazing,” he fumed. “This happens almost every afternoon around this time.”

RTD officials said they have heard numerous complaints from Blue Line engineers about those who try to dart across the tracks despite lowered warning guardrails.

On his Thursday afternoon run alone, Rocque had to slow not only for the car stalled at the 41st Street crossing, but also for a man in overalls who tried to limp across a downtown track with a cane, a group of children scurrying across the tracks at the Florence Station and a bicyclist, pedaling furiously, who sailed across the tracks near the Imperial Station.

And on Wednesday, just a few hours before the fatal accident, Rocque had to brake for yet another vehicle on the tracks at the 41st Street crossing. A tractor-trailer, Rocque said, had become trapped between the two guard rails after trying to cross illegally.

“I’ve stopped for a lot of rigs,” he said, adding: “I’ve been lucky I haven’t hit anyone.”

Earl Clark, chief of the United Transportation Union, which represents 5,000 RTD bus drivers and trolley engineers, suggested that one reason for the recent spate of collisions between cars and trolleys may be that in some areas near rail yards, motorists have been accustomed to speeding through lowered guard rails to bypass slow-moving freight trains.

“People aren’t used to the trolleys,” Clark said. “They’re used to freights that go maybe 15 to 20 miles an hour, tops. Well, these trolleys come through at 50 miles an hour.”

Similarly, RTD spokesman Davy said that a preliminary investigation into the deaths of Marinero and her son showed that the woman had tried to “beat a much slower-moving Southern Pacific train going by and didn’t see the Blue Line train.”

In the Thursday collision, officials said that four people were hurt when their Toyota compact failed to heed a lowered guard rail. The four were identified as Sroy Feng, 43, the driver; her son, Sok, 13; Sokhom Hak, 41, and her son, Nissay, 15. All four were taken to Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where they were said to be suffering from slight facial injuries, authorities said.

The Rail Commission’s Jester said that rail officials had just started a safety review Thursday, which is designed to provide new information to the commission’s Rail Construction Board about how to deal with track problems.

At present, the system relies principally on automatic gates, bells, alarms, blinking lights, train horns and security patrols to make intersections safe and keep tracks clear of obstructions.

The agency already “exceeds industry standards for safety hardware,” Jester said. “We have more bells and whistles than most agencies have and have a safety consulting firm to look at what we have today.”

Transportation union officials claimed, however, that some accidents might be prevented by signs warning motorists about the high-speed trolleys. According to Clark, few of his drivers have seen any warning signs.

“It would certainly be a help if they put up more,” the union representative said. “All you can really do in a situation like this is educate the public.”

Jester replied that “we do have signs. They say, ‘Danger,’ things like that.”

For the foreseeable future, transit officials acknowledged, they will have to rely on drivers’ good sense.

“Motorists will have to learn to observe the signals and barrier arms,” RTD officials were warning Thursday, “or they will be hit by a 96,000-pound train.”