Thousands of men sporting ties and suits, mixed with thousands of women in dresses and high heels, boarded a mass-transit system in the suburbs and rode into downtown.

A similar scenario is played out every business day in major cities across the nation. But on Sunday it's a rare sight, especially in Utah, where the dominant LDS culture frowns on fiscal activity on the Sabbath.

April 2, however, was not a typical Utah Sunday. The normally sleepy downtown streets were abuzz with the sounds of more than 40,000 people who came to attend the 170th Annual General Conference.

The epic crowds came to witness the church's newly constructed Conference Center, which seats 3 1/2 times more people than the old Tabernacle on Temple Square.

The new center sits just north of Temple Square, and the weekend conference had the potential to cause some serious overcrowding downtown. The major issue, from an organizational standpoint, was fitting so many people into such a small area.

"When one (conference) session is letting out, people are arriving for the next one, so you have 20,000 people leaving and 20,000 coming into about one square block," Salt Lake police motorsquad officer Shane Whiting said.

Light rail, however, offered church officials an option — a way to squeeze the record masses into downtown and avoid a parking and traffic nightmare. UTA officials, who operate TRAX, met with church leaders and hammered out a business deal allowing for special service for conference Sunday. The church agreed to make up the difference if TRAX didn't receive its normal business-day revenue.

Earlier, UTA said it would charge the church between $15,000 and $20,000 so church members could ride the light-rail trains to conference on Sunday. But Monday morning the transit system said it was not prepared to say how much the church will be charged. That's because figures on the number of riders were not available.

"UTA will look at the cost of operations, how much was received in fare-box receipts and charge the LDS Church the difference," Kent Jorgenson of the UTA community relations office told the Deseret News.

Jorgenson said TRAX ridership was definitely up on Saturday and Sunday, but figures were not available Monday morning for either day. He said riders encountered standing-room-only situations on many trains both days.

"We had a lot of new riders, people who had never been on TRAX before. It was a great opportunity because we were able to introduce the system to a whole new group of riders both days," Jorgenson said. He noted that about 23,000 people ride the light-rail system on a normal Saturday.

"It's so nice not to have to deal with the parking," said Inger Oveson, who drove from Nephi with her husband, Mark, to the Midvale-Fort Union station and rode TRAX downtown. "Every time I would come up here, I would get totally lost because of the construction."

Many of those who gathered at the Temple Square station, 155 W. South Temple, rode TRAX for the first time Sunday.

"It was cool," said Hunter High School 10th-grader Ashley Vizina, who rode TRAX with four schoolmates. "It's easier than finding a parking place."

For the 14 Salt Lake police officers the church hired to handle crowd control, conference was a walk in the park. "We had no problems; it worked out really nice," officer Jim Bloomer said.

Deseret News staff writer Douglas D. Palmer contributed to this report