The following excerpts appeared in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune on January 3, 2025. To read the full article (may require subscription), click here.
A Line light-rail extension from Azusa to Pomona set to open in late summer – San Gabriel Valley Tribune
Habib Balian, CEO of the Foothill Gold Line Construction Authority, shows the substantially completed La Verne Station which is part of the completed 9.1 mile segment of the A Line light-rail (formerly known as the Gold Line) on Thursday Jan. 2, 2025. (Photo by Keith Durflinger, Contributing Photographer)
By Steve Scauzillo
January 3, 2025
[excerpts]:
The [Glendora to Pomona] extension that runs along the foothills of eastern Los Angeles County will soon receive more safety testing and also dedicated training of personnel to run the trains and populate the stations. This will last through August, meaning the extension could open to passengers then or later in the summer, said LA Metro, which operates the A Line (formerly called the Gold Line) from Azusa to Long Beach.
…
The $1.5 billion light-rail project includes four new completed stations in Glendora, San Dimas, La Verne and Pomona. The workers also built 19 bridges — four over city streets and the rest clearing waterways; 21 at-grade crossings; 10 miles of sound walls; and four new parking lots.
“Not only did we have COVID to deal with, we had two record summers of extreme heat, and two record winters during that time. Both 2023 and 2024 were very wet years,” explained Habib Balian, CEO of the Foothill Gold Line Construction Authority on Thursday. “And after dealing with COVID and those natural elements, we still finished on time.”
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Also, the Pomona Station is significant because it will be the first station — not counting Downtown L.A.’s Union Station which existed before the A Line was built — to have a stop for the Metrolink San Bernardino line train.
“It is very important to have these lines (Metrolink and LA Metro’s A Line) connect,” Balian said on Thursday. “It gives people an option. They would have a way to get into Pasadena that they didn’t have before. And connecting to Long Beach I think is huge.”
To read the full article (may require subscription), click here.
It took how many years to build the extension to Pomona? Then the construction company spent 6 months on testing the system.
Now that is done, and the project is considered “finished” Metrorail, is going to spend another 8 months, doing their own testing?
It seems like we could have gotten this new line available for the riders a lot sooner, if the construction company an Metro got together and overlapped their testing.. At this rate, I won’t live long enough to be able to ride on the new extension. I won’t even go into the subject
of the extension to Montclair will be another 5 years in construction, due to the bungling of the finances for the project, when some groups
wanted to play “politics on the funding of the project