Closure of Doran St. Rail Crossing OKd

Seeking to improve safety, the Los Angeles City Council agreed Tuesday to close a perilous railroad crossing that has been the scene of several accidents, including two pedestrian deaths.

Trucks often use the Doran Street crossing, just off San Fernando Road on the boundary of Los Angeles and Glendale, to reach a recycling plant and other industries on the western side of the tracks, officials said. Occasionally, a truck driver will attempt to cross the tracks even when another vehicle is blocking the road on the other side.

“In several instances, trucks have gotten stuck on the tracks when the gates come down,” said Bob Kadlec of the Glendale Redevelopment Agency, which supported the closure. “Some people get impatient and they just start to cross. They think there’s no train coming and the gates are up, but then they enter the crossing and get stuck.”

In 1998, a man walking on the tracks at Doran Street was struck by a Metrolink train and killed, a suspected suicide, Metrolink spokeswoman Claudia Keith said. Another pedestrian, also thought to be suicidal, was killed there a year earlier. In 1995, an Amtrak train slammed into a big rig at the crossing.

In the most recent incident, in 1999, a train collided with a vehicle on the tracks, Keith said. The line gets heavy use from Metrolink, Amtrak and freight trains.

The city of Los Angeles agreed to shut the crossing, which will cost less than $7,000, in exchange for permission to open a crossing about 20 miles away on Mason Avenue in Chatsworth, said Ron Mathieu, Metrolink’s manager of public projects.

Mathieu said a 1993 Metrolink study found that the Doran Street crossing could be eliminated with little impact on traffic. There is another crossing less than a mile to the south, at West Broadway.