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Southern Pacific Sacramento Division by Brian Jennison & Victor Neves
Southern Pacific Sacramento Division by Brian Jennison & Victor Neves
Hard Cover w/ dust jacket
144 pages
Copyright 2006
CONTENTS
1 SACRAMENTO VALLEY6
2 SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY26
3 VALLEY BRANCHES46
4 DONNER CROSSING56
5 DONNER WINTER94
6 OVERLAND WEST110
7 OVERLAND EAST 128
FOREWORD
Here, at last, is Southern Pacific Sacramento Division, volume two in our series of color pictorials of the Southern Pacific Railroad. We began this project in 1991 and published volume one, Southern Pacific Oregon Division in 1997. This book picks up where volume one left off, in Dunsmuir, California, and continues our fond look back at the SP down through the Sacramento and upper San Joaquin valleys, over the Sierra and across the Nevada desert to Ogden, Utah. As we wrote in the foreword to volume one, "No one was neutral about the Southern Pacific: One either embraced or rejected this proud, arrogant company. The Southern Pacific and its predecessor company, the Central Pacific, shaped the political and economic development of the American West, and of California and Oregon in particular."
The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California was incorporated on June 28, 1861, and a little more than a year later, on July 1, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act, authorizing the CP and the Union Pacific to build a railroad and parallel telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. Several dramatic accounts have been written about this, the most significant engineering endeavor of the American 19th Century. Suffice it to say here that once the transcontinental railroad was completed on May 10, 1869, with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory, Utah, it set into motion the construction and consolidation of numerous feeder 5 lines in California, leading to nearly a century of dominance of the economic life of the Golden State by the Central Pacific and its successor company, the Southern Pacific Railroad.
San Francisco may eventually have become the center of the universe for the Southern Pacific, but Sacramento was where it all began. In 1852 the Sacramento Valley Rail Road was incorporated to build east toward what is now Folsom and Placerville. That line, later absorbed by the SP, was opened in February 1856. The chief engineer of this enterprise was none other than Theodore D. Judah, the man who would later survey the Central Pacific's route across the Sierra Nevada. In his attempts to raise money for this grandiose venture, Judah was unsuccessful among potential financiers in San Francisco, but he did manage to interest a Sacramento hardware merchant, Collis P. Huntington, in his scheme. Together with Huntington's partner Charles Crocker, the grocer Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, a dry goods merchant, Huntington backed Judah in his efforts to show that a railroad could indeed be built along the ridge tops of the rugged Sierra, following first the American, then the Yuba River to the summit. Thus was the railroad that would eventually become the mighty Southern Pacific born, in Sacramento.
Sacramento was also the logical place for centralized locomotive and car maintenance, and a massive and sprawling shop complex developed to support the myriad needs of the transcontinental railroad. In addition to maintaining and repairing steam locomotives, the Sacramento shops also built them, as early as 1872. Sixty-six locomotives were built in Sacramento during World War I when SP needed additional power but the builders back east were busy with the war effort and could not supply them. The Sacramento shops also manufactured locomotive boilers, frames and running gear that were assembled into finished locomotives by other SP shops in Los Angeles and Houston. Freight cars were built and overhauled at the shops, and there were bridge and building facilities and company stores as well. At its height of operations, the Sacramento shops were probably the largest railroad shop complex west of the Mississippi. The shops served SP well into the modern era, developing among other innovations the "Hydra-Cushion" freight car cushioning system and repairing and rebuilding diesel locomotives until the complex was finally closed in 1993.
A major yard was opened in Roseville in 1907, at the junction of the Overland Route and the East Valley Line to Oregon (indeed, the city of Roseville was originally known as "Junction"), and the yard was expanded significantly by 1927. Additionally, the Pacific Fruit Express Company chose Roseville as the site of one of its two major refrigerator car-servicing facilities on SP lines (the other was in Tucson, Arizona). Diesel locomotive servicing facilities were built at Roseville in 1949 and a hump yard was opened in 1952. SP transferred heavy freight car maintenance from the Sacramento shops to Roseville yard in 1980, as well as those diesel locomotive maintenance functions that remained when the shops were closed in 1993. Significantly rebuilt by successor Union Pacific in the late 1990s, Roseville remains the largest and most important west coast railroad yard to this day.
In addition to examining the Southern Pacific's important Sacramento-Roseville hub, Southern Pacific Sacramento Division also looks at the 1944 line relocation due to the building of Shasta Dam, and traces the East and West Valley Lines down the Sacramento River Valley to Roseville and Davis, respectively. The San Joaquin Valley is covered as far south (railroad east) as Fresno, as are the SP's valley branches, including the West Side Line south from Tracy. There is extensive coverage of SP's spectacular line over Donner Pass, in both summer and winter, and finally, we take an in-depth look at the vastness of Nevada, including the lonely Mina Branch, and end with the dramatic crossing of the Great Salt Lake into Ogden, Utah.
The Southern Pacific established General Offices in San Francisco, and for purposes of the timetable, all trains headed toward San Francisco were considered westbound, while all trains headed away from the city were considered eastbound. This makes perfect sense on the Overland Route, but it was less clear when dealing with trains heading geographically north or south in the Central Valley. We will follow SP directional convention in the photo captions; thus a train heading geographically north from Fresno is a westbound by timetable convention, as is a train headed geographically south from Dunsmuir.
Brian L. Jennison, Victor D. Neves, March, 2006 5
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