VTA 920 (Heritage Streetcar, San Jose Diridon - Civic Center)
mele kalikimaka: or, a holiday special article
For the first time since 2019, VTA’s holiday trolley ran on the weekends of December 21/22 and 28/29, 2024. In my humble opinion, they should do this more often, meaning more than every five years.
This year’s trolley is a streetcar from Milan circa 1920. These are preserved at San Jose History Park, then shipped up to Diridon to run the route. There is no publicly available schedule for this year’s trolley runs as of yet, but I was told there should be one available by the 28th/29th runs.
Much thanks to Bay Area Transit discord user 2fache for posting a schedule in general chat, which had a route number on it. That’s where the 920 comes from.
the route
These pictures are all out of order, and that’s okay. I don’t particularly care about the order here, just that all the pictures make it in. The route the trolley takes parallels that of the light rail from Diridon through the downtown transit mall to Civic Center station, where it sits at a crossover to come back a few minutes later. The total travel time from Diridon to Civic Center should be around ~30 minutes, but this is highly variable depending on traffic signals.
Leaving Diridon, we went under the tunnel to take us to San Fernando, where we did the classic Green line wiggle to get onto San Carlos. This image was taken on the corner of San Carlos and the tram ROW.
Convention Center and the nearby San Jose Civic Theatre were both quite busy today. Derek Hough was at the theatre tonight. I don’t know who that is.
It’s also Christmas in the Park season in Downtown SJ! Fortunately, the Park in question is not the park pictured. Cesar Chavez is much livelier than St. James, which was, as usual, the sketchy downtown park.
We passed only one tram on this entire route. The extremely funny thing about the trolley is that all regular light rail vehicles have to wait behind this 15 mile an hour streetcar, which makes the already-slow downtown segment even slower. How fun!
We were about ten minutes late to our final stop of Civic Center, mostly due to signal priority (that’s the name of the blog…) not necessarily liking our streetcar.
in review
For a once-off fun holiday streetcar, this does the job. I really do not want to be critical of this. It was a fun ride on some nice old machinery, and a rare cool experience riding VTA. My few gripes have to do with the signal priority not seemingly respecting streetcars instead of LRVs, which contributed to this being so late in the end. Besides that, these heritage streetcars should definitely be running more weekends; it’s incredible how these haven’t run since 2019!
final thoughts
uhhhhhh im gonna abstain from giving this a number grade
happy fourth of july y’all. more regular bus content Soon i hope