Now arriving: National Train Day

Observances may be bigger elsewhere, but Sacramento is a significant place to celebrate the first National Train Day on May 10.

That's because the groundbreaking for the western half of the transcontinental railroad took place in 1863 at the foot of K Street, in what is now Old Sacramento. Then began the backbreaking work of putting rails across the Sierra Nevada and into the "civilized" United States.

And, the California State Railroad Museum has on permanent exhibit three icons of that railroad: Thomas Hill's famous 1881 painting "The Last Spike," the so-called "lost" golden spike that few people knew existed for 136 years, and the first Central Pacific Railroad locomotive, the Gov. Stanford.

In addition, Sacramento remains an important railroad town. The local Amtrak station is the busiest passenger-train depot in Northern California and the eighth-busiest in the United States, according to Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham.

Both the railroad museum and the Amtrak station will host National Train Day festivities. The museum will show a 15-minute video about contemporary train travel and display in its roundhouse a modern-day, double-decker California coach car that operates on Amtrak's Capitol Corridor and San Joaquin lines. The car will be powered up, with helpful docents aboard to answer questions.

A short distance away, the Sacramento Amtrak station will be open with postcards, stickers and other giveaways, and light refreshments will be served to celebrants.

National Train Day was created by Amtrak, the national railroad passenger corporation, to celebrate record-setting train ridership over the last few years.

May 10 was chosen because on that day 139 years ago, California Gov. Leland Stanford drove a golden spike into a ceremonial railroad tie at Promontory Point, Utah, marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

"A lot of people haven't set foot on trains in the modern age," says Paul Hammond, museum director for the Sacramento History and Railroad Sector of California State Parks. "In Sacramento, when you add up how many passenger trains call at our proud (Amtrak) station, there are more trains serving that station today than when it opened in 1926."

In a single day, 44 trains arrive at and depart from the Sacramento station. The bulk are Capitol Corridor trains, which run between Auburn and San Jose (serving San Francisco with connections to Amtrak buses in Emeryville or to BART trains at the Richmond station), and the San Joaquin line, which runs down the Central Valley.

Across the country, people are riding trains in record numbers. Amtrak reports 25.8 million passengers during fiscal year 2007, the most since the train system began operating in 1971.

Amtrak has planned large-scale celebrations of National Train Day in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Closer to home, the Davis Amtrak station, 840 Second St., is hosting an open house from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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