miramar marine corps air base | Russel Ray Photos

When Jim and I went to Los Angeles on Sunday, May 11, for National Train Day, our purpose was to ride the trains everywhere we wanted to go. Down the hill from us we caught the San Diego Trolley:

Westbound at the 70th Street Station
5:50 a.m. on National Train Day

The Trolley took us to the historic Santa Fe Depot in downtown San Diego. There we caught Amtrak Pacific Surfliner to points north, ultimately to the even more historic Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

The three videos below show some of the more interesting areas the trains go through. In the first one, we’re heading into Miramar Marine Corps Air Base. There are some neat landscapes but usually the front of the train is not accessible (I had a cool engineer!), the side views are horrible because of the steep canyons, and walking the tracks on the Marine Corps base is not something one wants to do. So the first video is a real rarity.

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This second video is another one that I’ve always wanted to get as the train goes through the marsh that is the eastern side of Torrey Pines State Park. The video shows us cruising down the track at 92 mph, the top speed I caught us going. At the end of the video we have slowed down to 55 mph to go around the curve under the historic Del Mar bridge, currently undergoing much-needed renovation and seismic retrofitting.

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This last video is the final place in San Diego County that I’ve tried so many times to get to. It’s the rail yard for Metrolink and Coaster, where the trains are stored during hours of non-operation. Unfortunately, it’s on the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base and inaccessible to mere mortals like me. We also meet a southbound Amtrak Pacific Surfliner.

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Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, at over 125,000 acres, is what separates San Diego from the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In other words, it’s probably the only thing that keeps L.A. from annexing San Diego — that we wouldn’t like!