Test Tube : Subway Trains Speed Beneath L.A. Streets in Red Line Trial Runs

Tunnel lights stretched into a blurry streak as Arnold Gainey raised the T-shaped throttle, smoothly accelerating his vehicle with a barely audible, otherworldly hum.

“If there were lights on both sides of the tunnel,” said Gainey’s boss, John Byrd, “it’d be like leaving the Starship Enterprise in a smaller craft.”

Gainey, however, was as far from outer space as he is likely to get. He was about 60 feet under Hill Street--at the controls of a subway train.

Unknown to thousands of people overhead, subway trains have been racing under downtown Los Angeles several nights a week for more than a month, giving electrical engineers and future train operators a chance to start working out the kinks in the $1.45-billion Metro Red Line.

A subway in car-crazy Los Angeles was ridiculed as recently as 1986, when Congress debated whether to shoulder half the cost of what has become one of the most expensive mass transit projects in history. The other half is paid for by state and local taxes, primarily a half-cent sales-tax surcharge approved by voters in 1980.

Despite such skepticism, the initial 4.4-mile stretch of subway, the fulfillment of promises made nearly two decades ago by Mayor Tom Bradley and Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, is now operational.

Regular service is scheduled to start next year at five stations between Union Station and MacArthur Park. An extension under Wilshire Boulevard to Western Avenue is scheduled to open in 1996, with service along Vermont Avenue to Hollywood Boulevard scheduled to open in 1998.

Subways, the Red Line and the Orange Line, are envisioned as eventually reaching into the San Fernando Valley and out to Westwood and East Los Angeles.

In addition to working out the complex system’s kinks, the tests let the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which is building the system, educate supervisors from the Southern California Rapid Transit District, which will run the trains.

One big kink had to be worked out before the tests could start: A turn between the Pershing Square and Metro Center stations was too sharp for trains to squeeze past. The problem, caused when a massive tunneling machine slipped while boring under Hill Street, was fixed by gouging out the wall on one side of the tunnel and shaving part of an emergency walkway on the other.

Another kink involved finding cars to use in the tests. Regular Red Line cars are only now becoming available because the car builder is eight months behind schedule. To bridge the gap, the LACTC has leased four cars from Miami.

Regular RTD drivers are scheduled to start training on the subway in June, exactly one year before the system is slated to board its first paying customer. However, the line and its four stations are close enough to completion to fuel speculation that service could start as early as January, 1993.

Gainey said he has seen so much progress since he began training last August that he would not be surprised if the Red Line opened in time to shuttle the first Metrolink commuter-train customers between Union Station and downtown in October.

“When we came over, this was raw--very raw,” he said, taking a train into the Metro Center station. “This column here, it was just a bare I-beam with no concrete. Where that escalator is over there was just a hole in the mezzanine with some temporary construction stairs.”

Now, stations not only have finished walls and working escalators, but art as well--from some whimsical flying mannequins at the Civic Center to colorful neon abstractions at Pershing Square and a large multiethnic tile work mural at MacArthur Park.

When the RTD began construction in 1986, it anticipated starting service this month. When the LACTC took over two years ago, opening day had been pushed back to September, 1993. Recently, it was moved up to June, 1993.

But several major hurdles remain, LACTC officials said.

One is the delivery of the cars from Breda Construzioni Ferroviarie in Italy. Tests used to coordinate the propulsion and braking systems are taking much longer than planned. The commission’s Rail Construction Corp. subsidiary has dispatched engineers to speed the process.

To help them stop, the sleek stainless-steel cars use “regenerative braking,” much as automobile drivers use a lower gear to slow cars going downhill. In Red Line cars, the process also causes their motors to generate electricity, said RCC President Ed McSpedon.

“So as one train is pulling into a station, it is slowing down and pumping power back into the third rail,” he said. “At the same time, generally, another train will be pulling out of another station on another track and can use that extra power to accelerate.”

Smoothly blending regenerative braking with conventional friction brakes has been trickier than expected, McSpedon said.

Two test cars have arrived in Los Angeles after working out the problem at a federal test track in Colorado; a second pair is being tested now. The first pair of regular production cars is expected to arrive Wednesday at the Red Line yard east of downtown.

Another problem, still being worked on, involves a complex emergency-communication network, which is eight months behind schedule and 68% over budget. Transit officials said the network, designed in the mid-1980s, was slowed by a string of technological developments--including new, incompatible radio systems bought by police and fire departments--that had to be accommodated.

In addition to police and fire communication gear, which supplements normal radios that do not work in tunnels, the network includes seven other subsystems for such tasks as earthquake detection, methane-gas sensing and closed-circuit television security.

“It’s a lot of technology, and it’s all being installed together for the first time in our system,” said McSpedon. “We have more--and more complex--components than ever before required in any transit system.”

The emergency-communication system originally was to be installed, tested and ready by last Tuesday. It is now scheduled to be completed no sooner than Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, the cost has grown to $60.1 million from an original bid of $35.7 million.

Despite these concerns, McSpedon said he is far more optimistic about the system opening in June, 1993, than he was in the recent past. The most difficult construction work is completed, he said, and the June opening seems safe.

“The big worry about methane turned out not to be a problem,” he said, referring to some local elected officials’ worries of deadly tunnel explosions caused by flammable gases seeping out of local soil or abandoned oil wells. “We didn’t run into any old oil wells.”

Although an independent audit recently concluded the accident rate for the first Red Line segment was about twice the national average for heavy construction projects, McSpedon noted that no one was killed in several years of tunneling and underground construction.

McSpedon said the experience has given the RCC and its contractors confidence as they tunnel deeper into the second, 6.7-mile segment, which will go through even more methane-laden soil.

The first segment also taught the RCC how to work smarter, McSpedon said. For example, rather than tunnel in short segments between stations, he said, engineers found it easier and cheaper to do all tunneling at once and “drop in” stations later by digging from above.

At the same time, stations in the second segment will be built by one contractor. In the first segment, the stations were divided between two contractors to make the tasks more manageable, McSpedon said.

However, that led to conflicts and delays. Two contractors filed claims against the RCC, saying conflicts denied them a chance to make a profit on the project. The LACTC paid at least two such claims of more than $20 million.

Smaller problems have been harder to solve. For example, McSpedon still is looking for ways to mask crusty water stains on some station walls. The stains are caused by mineral-rich water seeping through holes in plastic station and tunnel liners installed to keep methane and other gases out of the tunnels.

One solution is to cover the bare concrete walls with architectural panels made of metal or some other material, McSpedon said. Another is to simply paint the walls with waterproof gray epoxy paint.

Fixing such problems is necessary to make the system last and to attract a loyal ridership, McSpedon said, so they must be dealt with before the system opens.