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The Overland Route was a train route operated jointly by the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad / Southern Pacific Railroad, between Council Bluffs, Iowa / Omaha, Nebraska,〔(Executive Order of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, Fixing the Point of Commencement of the Pacific Railroad at Council Bluffs, Iowa. dated March 7, 1864. ) (38th Congress, 1st Session SENATE Ex. Doc. No. 27)〕 and San Francisco, California over the grade of the First Transcontinental Railroad (aka the ''"Pacific Railroad"'') which had been opened on May 10, 1869. Passenger trains that operated over the line included the ''Overland Flyer'', later renamed the ''Overland Limited'', which also included a connection to Chicago. Although these passenger rail trains are no longer in operation, the Overland Route remains a common name for the line from California to Chicago, now owned entirely by the Union Pacific. == History == The name harkens back to the Central Overland Route, a stagecoach line operated by the ''Overland Mail Company'' between Salt Lake City, Utah and Virginia City, Nevada from 1861 to 1866, when Wells Fargo & Company took over the stagecoach's operation. Wells Fargo ended this stagecoach service three years later. 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 when the Union Pacific inaugurated service of its ''Overland Flyer'' on November 13, 1887, between Omaha and Ogden, Utah, where passengers and through cars were transferred to the Southern Pacific which had acquired the CPRR’s operations on that line in 1885 under a 99-year lease. The UP changed its designation to the ''Overland Limited'' on November 17, 1895, and service continued as a daily train under that name in one form or another for almost seven decades. For the first dozen years that the SP met the UP’s ''Overland'' trains, however, it dubbed its service the "Ogden Gateway Route" with its connecting westbound trains operating as the ''Pacific Express'' and eastbound trains as the ''Atlantic Express'' before finally adopting the name the ''Overland Limited'' in 1899 for its portion of the run as well. The original 1,911 miles 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 early 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.〔''The Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States, Porto Rico, Canada, Mexico and Cuba''. New York: National Railway Publication Co., July, 1906. p. 654〕 E. H. Harriman bought the bankrupt Union Pacific in 1897; in 1901 he assumed control of the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific as well. The rebuilding of the Overland Route followed: hundreds of miles of double track, hundreds of miles of signals, and dozens of realignments to reduce grades, curvature, and perhaps distance. (The rebuilding actually started before the CP/SP acquisition—the map in the May 1969 issue of ''Trains'' shows Howell to Bosler realigned in 1899.) By 1926 the UPRR route from Council Bluffs/Omaha to Ogden was continuous double track, except for the Aspen Tunnel (east of Evanston, Wyoming) which remained a bottleneck until 1949. The CPRR/SPRR portion of the route was also largely double tracked during this period, with the completion of such projects as the 1909 Hood Realignment between Rocklin and Newcastle, double tunneling along the Sierra Grade including at Cisco and the summit (Tunnel #41), and the 1924 agreement to share tracks across Nevada with the Western Pacific Railroad's Feather River Route.〔("Union Pacific Donner Pass Track Improvement and Tunnel Clearance" ) Bloomberg.com〕 Among the most important improvements to the original grade was the Lucin Cutoff, a completely new stretch from just west of Ogden to Lucin, a few miles east of the Nevada border. It included a 12-mile (19 km) trestle on wooden pilings across the Great Salt Lake. Opened in 1904, this line cut off the line, eliminated 3,919 degrees of curvature, and removed of climb from the route, thus decreasing the steepest SP grade east of Lucin from 90 feet per mile to 21. But many other sections of the original 1860s grade were harder to improve on, notably over the Sierra Nevada between Colfax, California, and Reno, Nevada. The newer second track follows a better route here and there, but the original route changed little (except for the removal of the wooden snowsheds, or their replacement by nonflammable concrete ones) until the 1993 abandonment of the 6.7-mile section of the Track No. 1 crossing of the summit between Norden and Eder which includes the original Summit Tunnel (No. 6). Traffic was sent instead over the easier-to-maintain Track No. 2 and through the tunnel called “The Big Hole” (No. 41) which had been driven under Mt. Judah a mile south of the Pass when that portion of the line was double tracked in 1925. Aside from those modifications the Sierra grade looks much the same to train passengers as it did when the line opened in 1868. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Overland Route (Union Pacific Railroad)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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