San Jose light rail (#0099)

For many of my years living in the San Francisco area, San Jose was considered to be sort of a stepchild of the ‘urbane’ San Francisco, and few people that I knew ever visited it. For some reason, though, I invariably ended up knowing people who lived down there and ended up spending quite a bit of time around San Jose and the Santa Clara valley. The Santa Clara valley that I knew was much more car-oriented than the San Francisco/Oakland area, so it was a surprise to me when they began installing a light-rail system in the late 1980’s.

The light-rail train seen here is at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) station for the San Jose airport. There’s a free shuttle bus from the airport to this VTA station and there is a VTA train that goes from here to just outside the San Jose Amtrak/Caltrain Diridon depot (not the train shown), so the connection between the two worked quite well.