Sacramento's Southern Pacific Shops

By Kevin W. Hecteman

In 1862, the Central Pacific Railroad was founded and began building eastward from Sacramento as part of the transcontinental railroad. This required a shop capable of keeping the railroad s equipment in running order. So in 1867, in the swamps just north of town, the Sacramento shops were born. For well more than a century, this massive complex kept the Central Pacific and its corporate successor, the Southern Pacific, operating smoothly. For many decades, the shops were the largest employer in the Sacramento area, employing carpenters, painters, draftsmen, boilermakers, electricians, clerks, upholsterers, and others. The shops forces designed, built, and maintained locomotives, freight and passenger cars, and other railroading equipment. The complex closed in 1999. Most of the area, popularly known as the Railyards, is set for redevelopment. The California State Railroad Museum handles maintenance and restoration of its collection in two of the shops buildings and plans to develop a Railroad Technology Museum on the site.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: May 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781439640159

Kevin W. Hecteman

Kevin W. Hecteman, author of Sacramento Southern Railroad, has mined the collections of the California State Railroad Museum, the Center for Sacramento History, and other sources to tell the story of the Sacramento shops and its people.

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INTRODUCTION

Railroading is the stuff of American lore. There is the engineer, the envy of American youth, speeding down the track in command of a mighty steam locomotive. There is the conductor, in a well-pressed uniform, calling, Booooooard! and greeting passengers with tickets, please. There is the station agent selling tickets, typing up train orders, and handing them up to the crews, perhaps befriending the youngsters who come down to the depot to watch the trains go by.

None of this is possible without a strong backshop supporting the operation. Someone has to recondition the steam locomotive’s boiler or replace the electrical wiring on a diesel locomotive. Someone has to keep the wheels and brakes on the company’s railcars in top condition. Someone has to make minor repairs made necessary by wear and tear, or major repairs resulting from a wreck. Someone has to reupholster worn-out passenger car seats or replate the dining car silverware. Someone has to see to it that stations are kept supplied with telegraph blanks, notepads, and pencils, and that the track crews have picks, shovels, spikes, and other supplies needed to keep the tracks in good shape. Heck, someone has to build those locomotives and cars in the first place.

Simply put, the Central Pacific and its corporate successor, the Southern Pacific, could not have done what they did without their shops. Sacramento was not born a railroad town, but it became one early in its childhood. In 1855, only five years removed from statehood and seven removed from the Gold Rush, Sacramento—designated as the state capital only the year before—gained its first bands of iron. Indeed, the Sacramento Valley Railroad was the state’s first such transportation venture to be built. The SVRR was surveyed and engineered by young Theodore Dehone Judah, who would go on to even bigger things in the next decade.

The SVRR, according to railroad historian David L. Joslyn, set up its first shops in Sacramento in 1855. The buildings at Front and R Street being completed, Joslyn wrote, work was started on building platform cars (flatcars) and also six first-class passenger cars. These were the first railroad cars assembled in the West, or at least in California. The passenger cars, Joslyn noted, were so well built that they remained in service into the 1900s. These first Sacramento shops did not stay long; soon after the line opened in 1856, the SVRR moved its shops to Folsom, the end of the line. It would be left to another railroad to build the shops complex that would serve as the region’s largest employer for upwards of a century.

In 1862, four Sacramento merchants decided to back Judah’s audacious plan for a railroad to be built eastward over the Sierra Nevada and on to points east. Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker got together with Judah and incorporated the Central Pacific Railroad, with its headquarters at Sacramento. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on January 8, 1863, at the foot of K Street in what is now Old Sacramento. Stanford, who at the time was president of the Central Pacific and governor of California, deposited the first shovelful of earth for the railroad’s embankment, and there was much speechifying. On October 5, 1863, the first locomotive for the Central Pacific was delivered to the Sacramento River levee at the foot of I Street by the river schooner Artful Dodger. This locomotive was built in Philadelphia by Richard Norris and Sons and shipped around Cape Horn to San Francisco aboard the clipper ship Herald of the Morning.

The railroad, Joslyn wrote, had no shops [and] few tools. So the CP called upon the services of Goss and Lambard, a machine shop and foundry on I Street between Front and 2nd Street about where the California State Railroad Museum lobby stands today. Goss and Lambard employees assembled the locomotive, which became CP No. 1, the Gov. Stanford. Indeed, Joslyn writes, Goss and Lambard personnel became, in effect, the CP’s first shop forces. In fact, a few years later, CP bought Goss and Lambard. As late as 1948, Joslyn writes, a former Goss and Lambard building near 2nd and I was being used for records storage.

Central Pacific Railroad has started to erect a substantial frame building 20 feet by 150 feet on the banks of Lake Sutter near 6th and I Streets, wrote the Sacramento Union on November 6, 1863.

This building, which by the end of the month housed 10 or 12 workers, could be said to be the CP’s first company-owned shop building in Sacramento. Its purpose was the construction of rail cars. To handle this job, the CP brought in Benjamin Welch, formerly of the SVRR and the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad. Welch was brought to town by his friend Huntington, and one of his first moves was to look up an old friend, George Stoddard, with whom he had worked in the past. Stoddard came to Sacramento in 1864 and was soon installed as chief draftsman, a job he held until retirement in 1908.

By summer 1867, plans for the shops were coming together. Woolaver and Wilkinson were hired to design the complex. Sacramento had deeded the railroad 30 acres of swampland north of downtown, as well as Lake Sutter (also called Old Slough, then China Slough). By 1869—the year the Central Pacific and Union Pacific came together amid much fanfare at Promontory, Utah—the basic form of the shops was in place. Built were the roundhouse and a machine shop; this last, in expanded form, still stands today. Also built was a planing mill and car machine shop, for railcar construction; a blacksmith shop, to fashion parts needed for locomotives and cars; and a powerhouse with a Corliss steam engine, which drove the machinery in the planing mill, machine shop, and blacksmith shop by means