11 August 2009

[pdx] A Preview Ride On The MAX Green Line

2193.On Monday, me and The Wife™ and hundreds of our closest friends got a taste of what using the new Gateway to Clackamas segment of the new MAX Green Line would be like. It's a fifteen-minute trip to and from Gateway to the Town Center, and the ride is sweet, interesting, and smooooth.



The signage and the type design on this are really, really sweet. Prominent signage and a type which reminds one of Myriad Pro are just pleasant for this typophile to look at. To get invited,  you had to be on the TriMet mailing list for announcements and press releases. See what happens when you don't sign up for these things, Hmmm?

Anyway, the shelters are part of the new design regime at TriMet facilities, which include glass, metal, and etched art on the glass. Really sweet.



Public art is as plentiful as ever on the MAX Stations, and the glittering tile around the shelter supports is very pretty and visually neat. There's that excellent signage again. Seriously, I like this type a lot!

As our appointed time to ride came, the new cars came up from the south …



… went onto a middle-siding just north of the Main Street Station, and reversed back …



… and we were ready to load. I'll admit something here – I'm silly in love with these rail cars. They're beautiful. the streamlined look of the operators cabin remind me of some good SF (and a great deal of bad SF – but SF with style) movies that I saw growing up. Maybe we don't have our flying cars, but we do have some devastatingly good-looking transit rail. These are excellent cars.

Graphics on the side of the car reinforced the "GREEN MEANS GO" campaign that has some of the most charming art I've seen on transit collateral in a long time:



And so we boarded. Once on, a nice lady from TriMet gave us a ton of statistics: Eight stations, six in Portland, two in Clackamas County, the synthetic sound barriers that were made from 6,000 recycled tires, the long transit overpass over the Johnson Creek Blvd exit at I-205, the round trip time.




As one can see, the cabin is built for wide shoulders and the seats look very comfortable indeed. A beaming young woman gave out apples:



Green, of course. (I think the "PAA" refers to Portland Adventist Academy, the little private church-run school just down by SE 96th Avenue and Market Street)

And, so, on a beautiful, warm-but-not-too hot August day in 2009:



We boarded a new Green Line train and got a look at I-205 from the MAX. It was a good thing.



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