Rocklin, California

Rocklin is a city in Placer County, California located approximately 22 miles (35 km) from Sacramento, California, and about 6.1 miles (9.8 km) northeast of Roseville in the Sacramento metropolitan area. Besides Roseville, it shares borders with Granite Bay, Loomis and Lincoln. As of the 2010 census, Rocklin's population was 56,974.

History

Prior to the California Gold Rush the Nisenan Maidu occupied both permanent villages and temporary summer shelters along the rivers and streams which miners sifted, sluiced, dredged and dammed to remove the gold. Explorer Jedediah Smith and a large party of American fur trappers crossed the Sacramento Valley in late April, 1827. The group saw many Maidu villages along the river banks. Deprived of traditional foodstuffs, homesites and hunting grounds by the emigrants, the Nisenan were among the earliest California Indian tribes to disappear.

During the 1850s, miners sluiced streams and rivers including Secret Ravine which runs through Rocklin. The piles of dredger tailings is still obvious today, between Roseville and Loomis southeast of Interstate 80. Secret Ravine at the area now at the intersection of Ruhkala Road and Pacific Street was later mined for granite, some of which was used as the base course of the California Capitol Building in Sacramento, although the earliest recorded use of the rock was for Fort Mason at San Francisco in 1855. The granite was hauled out by ox carts before the arrival of the railroad many years later.

Rocklin (Amtrak station)

The Rocklin Amtrak station is a train station in Rocklin, California, United States served by Amtrak, the national railroad passenger system. The city and the Placer County Transportation Planning Agency funded the design and construction of the current $1.25 million depot, which opened in July 2006. Designed by Studio SMS of nearby Roseville and inspired by historic 19th and early 20th century stations, the depot is dominated by a clock tower. The building is finished in a random ashlar stone veneer in varying shades of grey and beige and stucco with complementary brown tones.

The depot has a waiting room for rail and bus passengers, and there are also offices for the Rocklin Area Chamber of Commerce as well as a room reserved for community meetings.

It's been claimed the platform is movable to accommodate Union Pacific's rotary snowplows, which may scrape a platform that is 8 inches above top of rail, but the Rocklin platforms aren't that high and don't appear to be movable, or to need to be.