Overland Route (Union Pacific Railroad)

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, 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.

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.

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