This past week, I got to enjoy the very first "Light Rail New Year's Eve" in Tempe. The Fiesta Bowl Block Party was a huge success and a ton of people were able to ride light rail to Mill Avenue for the very first time. The headlining band for the evening was the long time rock band STYX who performed on the main stage at Tempe Town Lake. With the stage set near the lake with the light rail bridge in the background, I found it really ironic to be watching a band that I loved as a little kid, while seeing the new rail cars pass over the light rail bridge during their performance.

I took this shot during the concert just before midnight. We had a really good time and look forward to riding into 2009!

Photo by RailLife.com

Remember... Rail Life has a "Phoenix Light Rail Group on Flickr." Basically, we want to share some of our pictures from the community and allow people to add their pics (or videos), as well. These can be light rail related, but we also want pics of your favorite spot, restaurant, sports team, community, etc.

The first week of service for our new light rail line went pretty well. Of course not everything was perfect, but I do think it has been a success so far. This past Thursday was the very first day of paid service for the new METRO Light Rail line in Phoenix, and it too had it's minor challenges. That afternoon I took the photo below at a Tempe light rail stop, where a fare box was already out of service. I am not sure what the problem was, but I did notice the box next to it wasn't displaying all of the choices correctly. I decided to check the boxes at the opposite end of the platform and they appeared to be working without any problems at all.

After boarding the train, I headed to Phoenix where I noticed a Metro crew working on a box at Central and Campbell. It was good to see that they had taken immediate action to get the repairs handled right away. In fact, when I returned to the Tempe station all of the boxes were working correctly.

In addition to these "minor" issues, there have been issues with accidents and the timing of the trains. As with any project of this size, one would expect some "growing pains" and some adjustments to be made. The technology that is in place to monitor the cars, platforms and tracks looks to be quite impressive. We will try to watch the progress and write about it some more in the future.

A 20 mile light rail trip should eventually take about an hour. A while back, we posted some information from Metro concerning travel times between a few destinations along the route. This morning, I was reading some "Twitter" updates and saw that my good friend Calie was going to take a "quick trip" via light rail and head to Lux Coffee Bar to kick off her Friday. This reminded me of Monday the 29th which was the first full day of operation (following Grand Opening weekend) for our light rail cars. On that morning, I happened to run in to Rick Simonetta while riding the trains. I thought it was cool to see the CEO of Metro riding the trains and personally answering questions from people. Rick mentioned that the travel times were taking a little longer than originally planned and that they are working hard to get them down to "normal" times. To me, it makes perfect sense for them to be taking longer in the beginning. The lines have been long and the cars have been jam packed full of people.

Yesterday, I decided to do a little experiment with travel times. I boarded a train at the McClintock and Apache station and headed toward Phoenix. Once on the train I thought of writing down the time it took me to arrive at a few different stops. It went as follows.

Train Left Dorsey and Apache at 4:50 p.m heading West bound. (this station has a Park and Ride.)

Train left the station at Priest Drive and Washington station at 5:06 p.m

Train left the station at 38th St and Washington station at 5:12 p.m (this station has a Park and Ride)

Arrived at Campbell and Central station at 5:39 p.m (just happens to be where Lux is located)

So, it took me 49 minutes from Dorsey and Apache to get to Campbell and Central. The travel times need some tweaking but I bet they will come down a bit in the near future. We will try to do some updates of travel times from other stops in the future as well.

For now, I hope you enjoy the ride!

We get a ton of questions about how to purchase light rail tickets. Hopefully, we can help out a little more.

An all-day pass currently costs $2.50 and is good on both local bus and light rail. All-day passes are good for unlimited use for that particular day and expire at 2:59 a.m. the following day. A "one trip" ride is currently $1.25.

Here is a handy list of things to remember:

Children 5 and younger ride free.

ASU students ride free with their U-Pass.

Reduced Fares* are available to youths ages 6-18, seniors 65 and over, and persons with a disability. Jurrors can also get a free pass from the courts.

Purchasing a light rail pass is pretty easy. I shot this video today, the first day of paid service here in the valley. Special thanks go out to my new friend Logan Marcum for giving me permission to film this video of us purchasing my first light rail pass. Logan is a junior at ASU studying Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance.

Of course, Metro's video is a done a little better so you can take a look at it here as well.

Please note; we are not affiliated with METRO.

We had a GREAT time on Opening Day of the light rail line by sharing a bunch of cool pictures and "tweet up's" with everyone. In fact, our group now has over 400 light rail related pictures! If you are heading out tonight and you are taking light rail to get there, feel free to add more pics to our "Light Rail Group" on Flickr and be sure to tell everyone where you are or what you are up to via Twitter. Just use the hash tag of #raillife so people can follow along.

If you don't know what Twitter is, sorry. BUT, try checking it out, you just might find a cool new way to communicate for 2009!

Again, Happy New Year! from the Rail Life crew..