Overland Route (Union Pacific Railroad)
While the Council Bluffs/Omaha to San Francisco "Pacific Railroad" grade was opened in 1869, the name “Overland” was not formally adopted for any daily extra-fare train over the route until almost two decades later.
The original 1,911 miles (3,075 km) of the route from Omaha to San Francisco traversed some of the most desolate (as well some of the most picturesque) lands of the western two-thirds of the North American continent.
While the trip originally took low-fare emigrant trains a full week (or more) to complete, by 1906 the electric lighted all-Pullman Overland Limited covered the route in just 56 hours.
After almost seven decades of continuous operation, the Overland Limited came to an end as a daily train on July 16, 1962, when the Interstate Commerce Commission approved termination of the service.
The only daily passenger train between Omaha and the San Francisco Bay area today is the California Zephyr, operated by Amtrak and mostly along a different, more scenic route.
The Zephyr only uses the Overland Route in the states of California and Nevada, passing through Salt Lake City instead of Ogden and traveling via the Central Corridor to Denver instead of Cheyenne.
About 36 miles (58 km) further west the route reached Sherman, the highest point on the line at 8,013 feet (2,442 m), on a high and rugged upland with bold rock masses eroded into fantastic, picturesque shapes.
Six miles after crossing the Bear River at Evanston the route entered Utah, a land which would provide passengers with close-up views of some of the most unusual rock formations of the entire trip.
After passing Henefer where Brigham Young and his Mormon pioneers had turned southward in 1847 to cross the Wasatch Mountains into Emigration Cañon, perhaps the two most famous features on the Union Pacific's section of the Overland, Thousand Mile Tree and Devil's Slide, came into view on the west, and south sides of the track, respectively.
For the 35 years after the driving of the “Last Spike” at Promontory Summit in 1869, all trains traveling west of Ogden passed over the site of that seminal event as they made their way around the northern end of the Great Salt Lake.
Ten miles past Lucin, the “Overland” crossed into Nevada at Tecoma, the nearest railroad town to the silver, copper, and lead deposits discovered in the region in 1874.
Passing through other western Nevada mining centers and through Wells, an important supply point on the old Emigrant Trail, the line then followed the valley of the 300-mile (480 km) long Humboldt River.
[citation needed] When the route opened in 1869, trains reached the San Francisco Bay area from Sacramento via a 140-mile (230 km) line (built by the original Western Pacific Railroad) by way of Stockton over Altamont Pass, and on through Niles Canyon first to a pier at Alameda, and shortly thereafter to the nearby two-mile long Oakland Long Wharf (later called the "SP Mole") from which San Francisco was then accessed by ferry.
In 1876, however, the CPRR acquired a line built by the California Pacific Railroad from Sacramento to Vallejo and in 1879 completed an extension of that road 17 miles (27 km) across the Suisun Marsh to Benicia.
