Matthew H Fish
Lead Service Attendant
- Joined
- May 28, 2019
- Messages
- 499
I created a thread with several different small trips around the Willamette Valley, but this is a much larger trip: an "overnight day trip" to San Jose on the Coast Starlight. This is my first real Amtrak trip since before the pandemic! My first overnight extended trip since before the pandemic. I made a video of it which I hope people will find interesting:
The video focused on a couple things, including the long distance trip to and from San Jose, and with the middle section talking about the city of San Jose itself, including a ride on the VTA lightrail. It is a long video, and not all of it will be interesting to everyone, because the skyscrapers of Silicon Valley and the snow covered trees of the Oregon Cascades might not have the same audience.
But a few things to note---
First, I have taken this route several times before (I think this is my fifth time on the Coast Starlight between the Willamette Valley and the Bay Area), but I continue to be surprised by just how long the middle part is---the part of the trip in the dark between Chemult and Chico going south, and between Sacramento and Klamath Falls going north seems like it has left the normal world and is floating in some type of dreamworld of never ending trees on an infinite plateau. Which can be very enchanting, but also very boring. Hopefully the part of the video that shows snow-covered trees isn't too boring!
Second, San Jose is an interesting city from a transit viewpoint. When the San Jose Didiron station was built, San Jose was a farming town with 50,000 people. It is now around 1,000,000 just in the city, the 10th largest city in the US, and also one of the richest and most important cities in the world. As the Bay Area grew, many of the transit systems put in place were obsolete by the time they were finished. The VTA lightrail, while it is good enough as far as it goes, has less service than the Portland MAX. The BART doesn't go to San Jose yet. So the San Jose station has long distance Amtrak, Capitol Corridor, Caltran, VTA and Altamont Corridor Express---five different rail systems all using one station, and all designed at different times to do different things. On one hand, the flexibility of these systems allows passengers to do different things, but it also seems they were jury rigged.
I also find it ironic that the San Jose Didiron station was not at all high-tech---I would think that in the technological capital of the world, the train station would have maybe wifi or electrical outlets to recharge phones, but it had neither.
The video focused on a couple things, including the long distance trip to and from San Jose, and with the middle section talking about the city of San Jose itself, including a ride on the VTA lightrail. It is a long video, and not all of it will be interesting to everyone, because the skyscrapers of Silicon Valley and the snow covered trees of the Oregon Cascades might not have the same audience.
But a few things to note---
First, I have taken this route several times before (I think this is my fifth time on the Coast Starlight between the Willamette Valley and the Bay Area), but I continue to be surprised by just how long the middle part is---the part of the trip in the dark between Chemult and Chico going south, and between Sacramento and Klamath Falls going north seems like it has left the normal world and is floating in some type of dreamworld of never ending trees on an infinite plateau. Which can be very enchanting, but also very boring. Hopefully the part of the video that shows snow-covered trees isn't too boring!
Second, San Jose is an interesting city from a transit viewpoint. When the San Jose Didiron station was built, San Jose was a farming town with 50,000 people. It is now around 1,000,000 just in the city, the 10th largest city in the US, and also one of the richest and most important cities in the world. As the Bay Area grew, many of the transit systems put in place were obsolete by the time they were finished. The VTA lightrail, while it is good enough as far as it goes, has less service than the Portland MAX. The BART doesn't go to San Jose yet. So the San Jose station has long distance Amtrak, Capitol Corridor, Caltran, VTA and Altamont Corridor Express---five different rail systems all using one station, and all designed at different times to do different things. On one hand, the flexibility of these systems allows passengers to do different things, but it also seems they were jury rigged.
I also find it ironic that the San Jose Didiron station was not at all high-tech---I would think that in the technological capital of the world, the train station would have maybe wifi or electrical outlets to recharge phones, but it had neither.
