You're Not Hallucinating: Trains Are Running on the Westside (PHOTOS)

It wasn't a ghost train you saw cruising through the Westside this week.

It was a genuine Expo Line car running along a pathway that hasn't seen commuter traffic since 1953. The folks at the Exposition Metro Line Construction Authority are in testing mode.

A car this week is being pulled by a hi-rail vehicle between Venice Boulevard in Palms and Military Avenue in West L.A., officials said. It has also be moving on its own power, a Metro spokesman told us.

The testing is being done to make sure that platforms, signals and other possible impediments won't interfere with the rail cars once they're up and running on the expanded edition of a line that currently runs from Seventh Street downtown to Washington Boulevard in Culver City. 

This testing cluster will happen again today and tomorrow, said Gaby Collins, the government and community relations manager for the authority.

Testing will resume again soon and eventually take a car all the way to the Expo Line's final destination, downtown Santa Monica, this summer, she said. The line is supposed to open to the public late this year.

For now workers are using human “flaggers” to stop traffic as the test car makes its runs. Expo officials are asking drivers to be on the lookout for workers and rail cars on streets that haven't seen a working train wheel in decades.

Credit: Jeff Zucker/Expo Line Construction Authority

Credit: Jeff Zucker/Expo Line Construction Authority

Credit: Steve Hymon/Metro

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