If I'd have known at the end of October that I was going to be laid off in the middle of November, I wouldn't have bought a full-month transit pass. But I had one, valid through November 30th, that I hadn't used since November 18th.

I rectified that situation today by going out and riding all the rail lines of the Los Angeles transit system. It took 6 hours and 25 minutes to ride from the North Hollywood station all the way back to the North Hollywood station -- a little longer than I thought it might, because I didn't count on the layovers at the end of the lines, i.e., having to sit on a train for 10-15 minutes waiting for its scheduled departure time to come around. That's probably one-fourth the time it would take to do the equivalent trip in New York, which has a much, much bigger system, but also has the advantage of many of its lines crossing more than once, so a round trip on every line is unnecessary. (I have no idea how long Chicago would take -- that's right, I haven't even been to all corners of the 'L', much less all in one day.)

The Blue Line, the Green Line, and the Red Line spur to the Wilshire & Western station represented new trackage for me. The Green Line was very boring, because it runs most of the way in the median of the 105 freeway, from which there's nothing to see -- there isn't even a good view of LAX from the Green Line tracks. The Red Line spur is boring, too, but at least it's only two stations long.

Also, on the trip, two different trains I was on made unscheduled stops to pick up trackside workers -- once on the Red Line between Universal City and North Hollywood, and once on the Gold Line between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights, at the Gold Line shops (there's a very short platform on the elevated structure there for workers to wait to be picked up).