When it gets quiet at night, if you're below the ridgelines in EP, you hear the trains blowing their horns down by the L.A. River. It sounds like a call from some other time. Though not everyone loves it. I know some people who sold their house at the north end of Elysian Heights in part because the hooting of the trains drove them around the bend. (They moved to a more sonically sheltered part of the neighborhood.) But for others the deep horn resonates.

The Los Angeles Railroad History Foundation will screen a film honoring that resonance at the Echo Park Film Center this evening (Thursday) at 8 p.m.

EPFC describes This Was Pacific Electric:

In 1902 Southern California was a collection of small farm towns. It was waiting for something to pull it together. That something was The Pacific Electric. This Was Pacific Electric is the story of the rise and fall of the “The World’s Greatest Electric Railway.” It is a complete history starting in 1872 with L.A.’s first horse car line and continuing through the last Red Car in 1961. The story is told using rare film footage, hundred of photographs, animated maps and extensive interviews. In fact, the PE Red Cars operated along Glendale Boulevard nearby the Echo Park Film Center and today, LARHF has installed a mini-museum open to the public in the Belmont Station Apartments located at the south end of Glendale Blvd. where the PE tracks used to disappear into a subway tunnel leading to the Subway Terminal Building on Hill and 4th Streets.

Featuring a Q&A with Josef Lesser, President of the Los Angeles Railroad Heritage Foundation. EPFC: 1200 N. Alvarado Street; 213-484-8846.