Hello from Irvine, CA, where I’m am staying with relatives at U.C. Irvine!
I arrived here yesterday and spent the day finishing off the northern Orange County stations (on my last trip last March I got Orange County from San Juan Capistrano and south, including all of San Diego County). The day began with a leisurely morning primarily because the hostel didn’t serve their free breakfast until 8am. Had breakfast been earlier or not included I would have just left and picked something up along the way. Metrolink Service south to Orange County is so terrible (with no trains after 8am until the afternoon) so I was stuck paying double ($16 instead of $9.50) for Amtrak down to Santa Ana on the 9:40am train, much later than I usually like the start my days. I went back to the modified Superliner in the consist (generally the most empty car because the doors are never manually opened as they half to be) and it was crowded there with a couple who got on in Anaheim waiting for me to vacate my seat (the stops are 7 minutes apart). Arriving in Santa Ana I was able to do Amtrak’s $3 left luggage storage for the day and not luck my backpack around as I finished Orange County. I was also able to use Metrolink’s rail services within the county by buying their new $7 OC Link Day Pass valid on both bus and rail for the day. Unfortunately midday train service on Metrolink is basically non-existent so I had to rely on OCTA’s bus service.
First it was an easy, short ride on Route 59 up to Orange. Next was a ride with quite a bit of walking down wide suburban car oriented boulevards with a short bus ride on route 53 up to Anaheim Station located on the edge of the parking lot of Angels Stadium. Then I had to wait quite a while for the 57 up to La Palma Avenue where I transferred to the 38 over to Anaheim Canyon Station. There I met some Metrolink customer service agents who told me my photography was fine with the usual just stay out of the ROW spiel. From there I got lucky and the once hourly route 24 came and I was able to have one seat ride over to Fullerton.
At that point it was already 3pm so I quickly did my photo essay of Fullerton before taking the 3:19pm train one stop out to Buena Park. Then was a photo stop and a ride on the 3:51 train down to Tustin. From there I was on an Inland Empire-Orange County Line train at 4:31 down to its terminus at Irvine. That was a nice long photo stop seeing how the station has slowly grown from the station house in 1990 to the parking garage in 2008. At 5:23 I took an empty OCTA-sponsored intra-county train (originated in Fullerton) down to Laguna Nigel/Mission Viejo where I had a quick 15 minutes of dusk photography with just enough light left to see and rode this train back up to Santa Ana, reclaimed my bag and took bus Route 59 this time south down to UC Irivine, strangely the bus picked me up at the Santa Ana depot by bulling into a bus bay right next to the long-distance coaches.
I now have every Surfliner Station south of Chatsworth!