The distinctive blasts of a train horn punctuated the air all day Tuesday as testing along the 11-mile G-Line went into full swing, signaling the beginning of the end to the prolonged wait for commuter-rail service to Arvada and Wheat Ridge.

“We’ve been counting down the minutes,” said Andrew Dahler, general manager of Kline’s Beer Hall in Olde Town Arvada. “This will just take us to another level.”

A few doors down Grandview Avenue at The Bluegrass Coffee & Bourbon Lounge, Veda Miller said the G-Line, running between Denver Union Station and Ward Road in Wheat Ridge, is expected to bring hundreds more shoppers, drinkers and diners to Arvada’s downtown commercial district.

“We’ve been anticipating the business it’s going to bring,” said Miller, a barista at the eclectic watering hole. “I think it will be a good thing for the whole town.”

But that good thing won’t materialize right away, as the Regional Transportation District still needs final approval from state regulators to initiate passenger service on the commuter-rail line — something the transit agency won’t get until February at the earliest. That would be followed by several more weeks of testing of G-Line trains, RTD spokesman Scott Reed said..

“There’s still a long way to go,” he said.

Reed described Tuesday’s activity as a “positive step” that puts the beleaguered line on a solid forward trajectory.

“We’re very encouraged by the first day of full testing,” he said.

The G-Line, which was slated to start carrying passengers more than a year ago, has been hampered by crossing-gate technology that for months vexed regulators and kept them from giving a green light to the line. It took until September to get the Federal Railroad Administration to sign off the wireless signaling design at its crossings, but the Colorado Public Utilities Commission was less sold on the system’s safety.

A PUC administrative law judge scheduled a hearing for March to consider RTD’s solution, though it’s possible that hearing date could be moved up to Feb. 15 — if no objections are raised by freight rail lines that use the same corridor or by several cities that border the tracks.

The judge ruled last week that full testing of the G-Line could resume while the crossing-gate challenges were being considered.

“I think we’re close,” Wheat Ridge’s new mayor, Bud Starker, said Tuesday. “This puts us on a more solid footing.”

Wheat Ridge has one station on the line, at Ward Road, and the city’s voters in 2016 passed a sales tax increase that directs $12 million to the area around the station to fund infrastructure improvements that will make the site more attractive to developers.

“There’s more raw land and opportunities for a variety of uses out there,” Starker said. “We want the ability to open that part of the city soon.”

Arvada has made even larger investments — opening a new four-story, 600-space parking garage at its downtown rail stop last year, for starters — in anticipation of an operational train line. Mayor Marc Williams said he has been peppered with questions from both residents and businesses about when the G-Line will begin service.

The frustration boiled over into a letter Arvada sent the PUC in October. “Our patience is at an end,” the letter from the city council said

“The continued, open-ended delay in commencing passenger service on the G-Line has real-world consequences for our communities and citizens,” the letter read.

Williams believes the letter, along with calls and emails residents made to the PUC after RTD held a series of open houses in October, helped prod state regulators to pick up the pace in evaluating the line for final certification. But he said he will save his hurrahs for when the first paying riders step aboard.

“There have been so many fits and starts with this for so long that I’m not going to be totally satisfied until we have passengers on the train,” Williams said.