Sacramento Northern RR Freight Depot Second and M Street Sacramento, Calif.

Description

Consolidating the interurban railways of Northern California.

This is a manuscript blueprint for a new freight depot located at the junction of Sacramento’s Second and M Street and built for the Sacramento Northern Railroad. The sheet is dated November 1918, so just as the Great War was coming to an end. It shows a full city block in plan, stretching between N and M streets, along what was then Second Street (today’s Capitol Avenue).

The plan shows the rectangular footprint of a long freight building set back from the street, a run of parallel railroad tracks and platforms running along the north face of that building, and a sweeping set of curved approach tracks that turn into the yard from the northwest corner of the block. The title and hand-lettered caption in the lower right corner identify the plan as the Sacramento Northern R.R. freight depot and provide us with both an exact date and location.

The block in question is boxed in by major streets still present in Sacramento today. In addition to N, M, and Second Street, the back of the building was flanked by Front Street on the Sacramento River. These prime locales in the urban fabric are today occupied by the University of California, Sacramento Campus (built 1975) and the Sacramento Hilton (Embassy Suites). In addition to outlining and labeling the flanking streets, the plan shows an alley running along the building’s track side. The drawing also includes interior partition lines within the building, delineated platform areas, and a small profile sketch at the right edge that shows the cross-section of paving against the building.

Context is Everything

The Sacramento Northern identity grew out of several early electric interurban railways that were built in Northern California in the first decades of the 20th century. One of the constituent lines, the Northern Electric (formed around 1904–1905), built north–south electric service from Sacramento into the agricultural Sacramento Valley, ultimately reaching Chico. Another line, originally the Oakland and Antioch and later the Oakland, Antioch & Eastern and San Francisco–Sacramento Railroad, built a route across the East Bay to Sacramento and used ferry connections to reach San Francisco. Over time, these separate electric interurban systems were consolidated and reorganized under a common name and operating structure, which is usually referred to as the Sacramento Northern System.

The system’s physical scope – connecting the Bay Area with Sacramento and the Sacramento Valley – made it unusually large for an interurban electric railway, and it carried both passenger and substantial freight business. Freight facilities such as the depot shown on this 1918 plan were an essential part of the company’s operations in Sacramento, where interchange with other railroads and local freight handling was concentrated.

The Sacramento region’s association with rail freight goes back to the era of the transcontinental and Central Pacific railroads. Sacramento had established passenger and freight depots along Front Street and near the river in the 1860s and 1870s; those earlier facilities anchored the city’s rail geography and helped determine later placement of interurban and freight terminals within the downtown street grid. Neatline’s 1918 plan for a freight depot is thus part of a long history of using Sacramento’s waterfront and Second Street rail facilities to accommodate both passenger and freight service across several generations of railroads. The 1918 sketched out on this evocative blueprint never came to fruition, presumably due to the uncertainties and shifting needs at the end of World War I.

After consolidation and changes of ownership in the 1920s and 1930s, the Sacramento Northern continued as an important regional interurban and freight carrier. Passenger service on much of the system declined in the 1930s and ended on most routes by the early 1940s.