Trams, Light Rail and Trolleybuses

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

I don't know much about transport even though I work for transport.

I work for LA Metro (Los Angeles Country Metropolitan Transportation Authority). I support some computer systems, primarily those which support the Material department supplying material for the maintenance shops. 

Occasionally I am assigned to work on something for the Rail people, especially one time I had a project about computerizing an inventory of the assets (pre-requisite: pry this inventory out of the brains and pencilled notes on scratch paper where it resided, apparently to the satisfaction of the Federal Railroad Commission and the California Public Utility Commission) for which the three disciplines (Signals. Track. Traction Power, which would be easier to understand if it were called just Power or Electricity) of what was then called Maintenance of Way (now merged into Rail Wayside Systems, along with Rail Facilities Maintenance, Rail Custodial, and Rail Comm) were responsible.

On the one hand, it's cool to go to meetings with the Rail men, because they all spent years at Southern Pacific before coming to Metro, and have anecdotes. On the other hand, I was constantly on One-Look Dictionary or Google trying to figure out what they said, and any number of glossaries of rail terms are blocked by our nannyware because they are classified in the categories of Hobby or Social.

Anyway, at that time, only two of our rail lines were in business. The oldest is the Blue Line, Los Angeles to Long Beach, which was called Light Rail even though parts of its route are street-running. Second oldest is the Red Line, our true underground Heavy Rail subway, with Third Rail power. The Green Line was about to go live at that time, and it was called Automated Guideway, but the plan of driverless trains was scrapped and the Green Line shares Blue Line cars. We have more lines since then, all of which would be called Light Rail except that the terms Light Rail and Heavy Rail were officially abolished when new management had a re-branding campaign.