Southern Pacific Railroad Yards

These yards were the whole reason Sparks exists. When the Southern Pacific relocated its division point from Wadsworth in 1904, it built an enormous new complex here—a roundhouse said to be the largest west of Chicago, with stalls for dozens of locomotives, plus machine and blacksmith shops and a towering coal bunker. For half a century the yards were the town's heartbeat and largest employer, where the whole community worked. The shift from steam to diesel in the 1950s shrank the operation. Freight trains still run the line through Sparks, the echo of the yards that built the city.

What the plaque says

Soon after 1900, laborers reworked some 373 miles of the original Central Pacific (now the Southern Pacific) line between Reno and Ogden, Utah. The effort involved shortening of the line in some places. One such change took Wadsworth (Nevada), a division terminal, off the main line. During the summer of 1904, the terminal was moved to this location, which became the town of Sparks. The railroad dismantled a huge forty-stall locomotive roundhouse in 1959. The machine and erecting shops are still standing. Had it not been for the railroad yards being moved here, the City of Sparks would not exist.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 3.3 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 16 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 17 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Sand Harbor — 25 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• Chinese in Nevada — steps away
• Glendale School (1864- 1958) — steps away
• Sparks — 0.8 mi
• Coney Island — 1.5 mi