The exciting updates glide on on the Westside transit front! A media event today at the new Expo Line station in Palms featured an actual train pulling up to the platform, just like it will when the line opens in spring of 2016 (if all goes as planned, which it is so far). According to a speech by Mayor Eric Garcetti at the event (seen on a Periscope video by KNX1070), the second phase of the Expo Line, which will run from Culver City to Santa Monica, is more than 90 percent complete. Now that's something to get giddy about.

The existing leg of the Expo Line, if you're not aware, begins in Downtown LA, at the Seventh Street/Metro Center station, meaning that when this second half ultimately opens, the Expo will more or less take riders "from Grand to the sand," as the mayor noted in his speech. (The DTLA station isn't exactly at Grand Avenue, and the train will end up about four blocks from the sand in Santa Monica, but come on, they're close enough). It'll be the first time in more than 60 years that DTLA, SaMo, and the Westside have been linked by light rail, he added.

The Palms Station is on the northwest corner of Palms and National Boulevards; it's one of seven new stations between the existing end of the line in Culver City and the terminus in downtown SaMo (at Fourth Street and Colorado).



· See a Train Cross Into Santa Monica For First Time in Decades [Curbed LA]