The next line started where the last one ended. Four Sacramento merchants — Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, the "Big Four" — backed Theodore Judah's scheme for a railroad over the Sierra, and in 1863 the Central Pacific broke ground in Sacramento. Crews blasted and bored east through the mountains until, in 1869, the line met the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah, and the country was bound together by rail. The roundhouses and shops stayed in Sacramento; today the California State Railroad Museum, the largest in the United States, anchors the Old Sacramento waterfront.
The Pony Express made Sacramento famous for eighteen months. The relay reached its western end at the J Street terminus and the B.F. Hastings Building, and a tired rider clattering in off the plains was the closest thing the 1860 West had to instant news. On October 24, 1861, the transcontinental telegraph line was joined, and two days later the Pony Express folded — wire could now carry a message coast to coast in minutes. Frontier ambition outpaced by faster technology: the pattern that would run through the whole of Sacramento's story.
Why People Visit Sacramento
Sacramento rewards travelers who want history, rivers, and shade rather than a beach — the Gold-Rush waterfront, the railroad that started here, the capitol, and a walkable grid under a famous tree canopy. People come for Old Sacramento and the Railroad Museum, for the Capitol and the gold bridge, and for an easy California day where frontier history and a leafy capital city sit side by side at the meeting of two rivers.
