Santa Fe Depot Layover: Downtown San Diego

San Diego’s Santa Fe Depot puts you five minutes’ walk from the bay at Broadway Pier and ten from the fountain at Waterfront Park, with the 1915 station hall itself worth the first of those minutes before you go anywhere.

The barrel-vaulted waiting room inside Santa Fe Depot

Bakewell and Brown, the San Francisco firm behind that city’s domed City Hall, put this station up in time for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, and meant it as an argument for California’s Spanish past. Two campaniles carry tile-covered domes with the railway’s blue cross emblem on all four faces. Inside, the waiting room runs under a plain barrel vault with a redwood beam ceiling, a wall of Moorish ceramic wainscot in green, yellow, blue, white and black, and a tall arched window above the ticket counters.

The building still does the job it was built for. Pacific Surfliner trains from Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo end here, the COASTER runs up the coast to Oceanside, two trolley lines call outside the front arcade, and the bus to the airport terminals stops on the same block.

The excursion boats tied up along Broadway Pier

Broadway Pier sits at 990 North Harbor Drive, five minutes west of the station down Broadway, and it is where the bay’s tour fleet loads. A fast run around the harbor is the version that fits a few free hours, threading past the carriers at the naval piers and under the Coronado Bridge. A whale and dolphin trip goes out past Point Loma into open water and takes most of an afternoon, which makes it the wrong call unless your flight is genuinely late.

Standing on the pier costs nothing, and the working harbor is most of the show: tugs, the ferry loading for Coronado, and gray navy hulls across the water at North Island. Checked baggage is suspended on the Surfliner, so everything a train passenger brought is carry-on, up to two bags of fifty pounds each plus a personal item, and that is a lot to walk to the water with.

Waterfront Park’s fountain runs the length of the county building

Until 2014 the ground on both sides of the San Diego County Administration Center was a parking lot. Twelve acres of park opened there in May of that year, and the fountain that runs down the length of it is 830 feet long, with 31 jets throwing water about fourteen feet up before it drops into a shallow basin people are meant to walk through. The 1938 county building behind it is pale, symmetrical and civic in the way that decade did well, and the lawns in front of it look straight out over the bay.

It is free, the reflecting pools run 9:30am to 6pm daily, and it is about ten minutes north of the depot along the water. The full San Diego layover guide picks up from the other direction, working south from the station to the carrier and the tall ship on Harbor Drive, if the ships are more your thing than the fountain.

The airport bus stops outside the depot’s front arcade

MTS Route 992 runs the three miles between Santa Fe Depot and both terminals at San Diego International Airport in about fifteen minutes, for a flat $2.50, every fifteen minutes from 4:15am to midnight. It picks up on Broadway alongside the station and puts you down on the upper-level islands at Terminals 1 and 2. Allow closer to 45 minutes door to door with the wait and the terminal walk, and more if you are changing terminals once you arrive.

There is a free alternative that costs time instead of money: two trolley lines from the depot reach Old Town Transit Center in about ten minutes, and the San Diego Flyer shuttle runs from there to both terminals for nothing.

Everything here is inside a ten-minute radius of the station’s front door, which is the whole appeal of arriving by train in this particular city. It is also the reason the bags are the only real obstacle, and they are the easy part to solve.