The Sacramento Valley Station has served as the point of departures and arrivals for many travelers to the Greater Sacramento community for more than 80 years and has long been a treasured city icon. Designed by the prominent San Francisco architectural firm of Bliss & Faville who designed a multitude of that city’s landmarks including the Geary Theater and the St. Francis Hotel as well as Sacramento’s D.O. Mills Bank, the Station is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, California Register of Historical Resources and Sacramento Register of Historic and Cultural Resources.

When the station opened in 1926, train service was at its peak (with the exception of the years spanning WWII) at 86 trains per day and annual ridership near 1.6 million and then began a continual decline until today where the Sacramento Valley Station is slated as the seventh busiest rail station in the nation and the second busiest in California with over 1.3 million passengers annually, and growing.

The City of Sacramento purchased the station from the successor ownership to Union Pacific in 2006. The city has pursued federal and regional Measure A funding and in June of 2012 was awarded $15 million in federal grant monies (TIGER Program) with $15million in matching funds from Measure A Sales Tax to rehabilitate the station and improve passenger service and leas ability of the building in what is referred to as Phase 2.

Presently construction work is underway on a separate project known as the Seismic Upgrade Project to strengthen the building to seismic standards. Concurrently, design work is underway for Phase 2 which will restore and rehabilitate the Station to improve the facility for transit users and to become a regional destination that will offer expanded commercial services for passengers, Amtrak operations and the general public, dramatically increase bicycle infrastructure, provide leasable office space, conserve and restore architectural details and art, and provide modern heating and cooling to the entire building. Construction work on Phase 2 is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2013 and span 24 months while maintaining full functioning transit operations.

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