Metro Gold Line

A Gold Line light-rail train carrying dozens of people hit a pickup during rush hour Tuesday morning in Highland Park, injuring seven people, authorities said. The crash occurred shortly before 8 a.m. at a crossing at Avenue 55 and Marmion Way. The 35-year-old driver of the pickup truck was taken to Huntington Hospital in Pasadena with unspecified injuries, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Suzan Young said.

The warning bells on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Gold Line trains would quiet down considerably through South Pasadena under a proposed settlement of noise complaints that won preliminary approval this week.

In an effort to boost ridership on the Gold Line light rail, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced Thursday that it would introduce express service beginning Feb. 13. The express trains will shave the 34-minute run time from Union Station to the Pasadena terminus to 29 minutes. The express trains will stop at only five stations: Union Station, Highland Park, Mission (South Pasadena), Del Mar (Pasadena) and Sierra Madre Villa (Pasadena).

The federal government Tuesday gave the go-ahead for a $490.7-million grant to fund an extension of the light rail Gold Line to East Los Angeles. The move, which was expected, will allow the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to hire a contractor to build the line, which will run from Union Station through Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights, ending at Pomona and Atlantic boulevards. Congress still needs to approve the funds for the six-mile line, which is to open in 2009.

The much anticipated Gold Line light railway connecting Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles will open July 26, pending safety approval, officials said Wednesday. Roger Snoble, chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said a dedication ceremony will be held July 25, with train service opening to the public the following day, a Saturday. The MTA had long said it would open the railway on July 1, but pulled back on that promise in recent months.

On the far eastern side of Pasadena, the Gold Line tracks run in the middle of the 210 Freeway and then, at Madre Street, they just stop. The old rail right of way continues up the middle of the freeway and extends across the width of the Valley, roughly paralleling the 210. Hardly any freight trains use the corridor, and it's been decades since passengers rode those rails. Public officials from across the San Gabriel Valley are hoping to change that soon.

The Gold Line extension into East Los Angeles promises to carry development and prosperity into an area long troubled by poverty and blight. But some business owners along the neighborhood's busy 3rd Street, where a large section of the six-mile, above-ground rail line is being built, say the roadwork and street closures have all but halted commerce in the area. Some merchants say they have been forced to skip rent payments and lay off employees.

It was to be a little aesthetic touch added to the Eastside extension of the Gold Line as it neared completion. But no one imagined what gremlins would be unleashed when workers added a layer of paint to the concrete at "cross-over" points where the light-rail trains could switch tracks. The coloring agent was made of iron oxide. And at intersections like 1st and Clarence streets in Boyle Heights it caused the painted concrete to conduct an electrical circuit that basically told a lie. "It was sending out a false signal that the train was there," said Dennis Mori, the Gold Line Eastside extension's project manager.

Attendees at Thursday's board meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority got a treat: a public spat between Los Angeles County Supervisors Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky that ended when Yaroslavsky walked out. His exit came after he had earlier described Molina's words as "selfish nonsense." At the root of the dispute were two items: rail safety and Measure R, the proposal to raise the sales tax by half a cent in Los Angeles County to pay for transit and freeway projects.