Union Station, a monument to the entwined elements of history and transportation, was a Johnny-come-lately as train stations go, but it played a leading role in making Los Angeles into the nation's second-largest city.
For more than a century, the mighty transcontinental railroads had helped to transform Los Angeles from an isolated town of 10,000 into a modern megalopolis. But getting them to unite behind a single station, a Union Station, was a task almost as difficult as bringing the railroads west. In 1869, railroad workers drove the golden spike at Promontory, Utah, joining the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific into a seamless transcontinental route.
The same year, Gen. Phineas Banning built the first railway south of the Tehachapi Mountains: the San Pedro & Los Angeles Railroad. On the locomotive, a sign painter lettered "LOS ANGELOS," an error discovered in the nick of time for the maiden run.
Banning's railway covered the 22 miles between San Pedro and downtown. The line, with its station at Alameda and Commercial streets, provided the city's only service for a decade. In 1873, the line was turned over to the Southern Pacific to entice the big railroad to come to Los Angeles. (Banning's station would become a flag stop for the Southern Pacific; travelers had to flag down the train to get aboard. That station was torn down in 1888.)
On Sept. 5, 1876, the Golden State's own golden spike connecting north and south was driven at Lang Station in what is now Santa Clarita. The Southern Pacific--called "the Espee" for its initials and immortalized as "The Octopus" for its stranglehold on state politics in Frank Norris' novel of the same name--finally chugged into Los Angeles.
No other single California company ever held the power and influence that the Southern Pacific did. For more than three decades, its slightest decision about where to lay tracks and where not to created some cities and destroyed others.
In 1880, in an area halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco called Mussel Slough, a dispute over land rights between settlers and the Southern Pacific erupted into violence, leaving seven men dead. The brief bullet-punctuated episode became a turning point, as public outrage swelled against the powerful railroad.
