My window view of dawn in San Francisco, on the morning of our road-trip to Roseville and Sacramento.

The morning's sunlight in the round room on February 12th

California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento

The best way to see a country is from the footplate of a locomotive.

George Dow

Every age has its dreams, its symbols of romance. Past generations were moved by the graceful power of the great windjammers, by the distant whistle of locomotives pounding through the night, by the caravans leaving on the Golden Road to Samarkand, by quinqueremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . . Our grandchildren will likewise have their inspiration-among the equatorial stars. They will be able to look up at the night sky and watch the stately procession of the Ports of Earth-the strange new harbors where the ships of space make their planetfalls and their departures.

Arthur C. Clarke

the whistle of the old steam trains ... could conjure up visions of bleak distances with one solitary wail.

M.C. Beaton

Old Sacramento

The locomotives are black. The coal is black. The tracks are black. The night is black. So what am I going to do with color?

O. Winston Link

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

Jeremy Rifkin

Ideas for work are coming to me in abundance...I'm going like a painting-locomotive.

Vincent Van Gogh

The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.

Peter Singer

Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings.

Alberto Santos-Dumont

The I Street Bridge crossing the Sacramento River

Located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River, it is affectionately known as the 'River City'. ... Sacramento has a rich and vibrant history which goes back to 1839 when John Sutter arrived on the shore near the confluence of the American and Sacramento River.

With the promise of a Mexican land grant, Sutter and his landing party established Sutter's Fort. As the settlement grew and became permanent, it attracted other businessmen looking for opportunities.

The city was named after the Sacramento River, which forms its western border. The river was named by Spanish cavalry officer Gabriel Moraga for the Santísimo Sacramento (Blessed Sacrament), referring to the Catholic Eucharist.

The I Street Bridge

California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento

Old Sacramento

Walking on History

Gold Rush Days in Old Sacramento

Labor Day

The Eagle Theatre is a reconstruction of the first building erected in California as a theater. The original playhouse, built of wood frame and canvas, with a tin roof, provided Gold Rush Sacramentans with entertainment for a mere three months before being inundated in the flood of January 4, 1850. 

Eagle Theatre

Lego Bear

Located in the Capital City's historic Old Sacramento area, the Old Sacramento Schoolhouse Museum is a living replica of traditional one-room schoolhouses found throughout America in the late 1800s.

The Tower Bridge is a Vertical lift bridge across the Sacramento River, linking West Sacramento in Yolo County to the west, with the capital of California, Sacramento, in Sacramento County to the east. It was previously a part of U.S. Route 40 until that highway was truncated to east of Salt Lake City.

History of the Tower Bridge

Sacramento Press article on the history of the Tower Bridge

Late night on the Bay Bridge upon returning home to San Francisco