While we're on the subject of historic CA-24, its maximum extent from the East Bay to near the Nevada state line was ridiculous. I'm all for longer routes, but it followed such a bizarre, S-shaped routing that required significant concurrencies and even wrong-way motoring to achieve the routing it did. Makes a lot of sense now why it was eventually broken up into the modern CA-24 and CA-70 (along with parts of other routes). (Although I do wish the modern CA-24 remained the Feather River Highway, as that was historically the original extent of historic CA-24).
It's interesting how the original CA 24 was configured when one looks at it as part of the historical original numbering idiom the Division of Highways used for Northern California. Starting at Stockton (!?), the E-W even number set -- those divisible by 4 -- commenced north: 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20. But 24 and 28 got weird -- 24 wound its way from Oakland/Berkeley up through the Delta and Sacramento to Woodland (on a reversed multiplex with SSR 16) and then north and east through the Feather River canyon and Plumas County all the way out to US 395 (originally SSR 7) where current CA 70 terminates today. And SSR 28 wasn't even in line with the rest of the system -- off to the west in "wine country" (today's CA 128) -- until NV wheedled the Division into relocating it at Lake Tahoe to match
their route number. By all means SSR 28 should have been where CA 162 is today. The string continued "normally" north of there with SSR's 32, 36, and 44 (of course taking into consideration US 40). But for some reason it was decided to make "24" a functional if convoluted alternative to US 40, crossing the latter in Sacramento. It was always considered a "all-weather" alternative to US 40 across the Sierras; the protracted shutdown of Donner Pass in the winter of 1952 (both road and rail) prompted AASHO to request renumbering of CA 24 east of Woodland as "Alternate US 40" to shunt traffic to the more benign alignment when US 40 was snowbound (or, in the early spring, occasionally mudbound). Signed as such during 1953, it led to the "useless multiplex" of CA 24 over CA 16 between Sacramento and Woodland; a situation alleviated five years later with the commissioning of LRN 232 and the rerouting of SSR 24 over it. Of course, the "24" saga was truncated, along with the route itself, in the '64 renumbering; it hasn't left the East Bay since.