A key part of the Expo Line Phase 2 project is a new rail car maintenance facility in Santa Monica, located east of Stewart Street and north of Exposition Boulevard.
While designs are being finalized for the maintenance yard, this presentation was given by the Expo Line Construction Authority earlier this year. I wanted to post it here because it’s one snazzy-looking rail facility [pdf here] and I don’t think many people have seen these drawings yet.
The two images above come from the following PowerPoint presentation on the facility. The second phase of the Expo Line between Culver City and Santa Monica is a Measure R-funded project.
Expo Line maintenance facility
Categories: Projects
Yumi, you have to think about the needs of the service being provided. In order to rapidly switch between rush-hour and normal schedules, train yards need to be spread out in order to serve lines in a timely manner, rather than making a central location a bottleneck. It’s possible that interconnecting lines may share facilities in the future, like the Crenshaw and Green lines, but for now the sprawl is a consequence of providing service. Train yards used to be even bigger and more numerous when Pacific Electric was still around…
Although making a maintenance yard an additional station would be a good idea, unfortunately most desirable station stops are in densely packed urban areas, often not having the requisite space necessary for train maintenance. Stopping at a train yard would become more of a nuisance to most passengers, unless the train yard was adjacent to a convenient park-and-ride away from freeway traffic.
Has Metro considered the option of making maintenance yard facilities as part of another station itself?
And there really needs to be a better way in the future to consolidate light rail maintenance yards into one large facility instead of building dedicated maintenance yards for every single line. This should be another case on why all the light rail tracks must be linked together.
Ron, The facility is being built simultanously with Phase II of the project (from Culver City to Santa Monica). The facility’s location is along this part of the route.
Perhaps the facility should have been built in conjuntion with the Expo Line, not long after the fact?