That does make more sense but my first guess was because Sacramento is the capital and close enough to San Francisco. I’m not sure that the Bay Area was particularly well defined yet either.
Interestingly while I was checking the incorporation dates of Oakland and Brooklyn (now part of Oakland) I saw that 1868 is the year that Central Pacific Railroad settled on Oakland as the West Coast terminus of the first transcontinental railroad and bought the San Francisco & Oakland Railroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_and_Oakland_Rail...).
> my first guess was because Sacramento is the capital and close enough to San Francisco
That didn't stop them from independently listing Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus Ohio, all with different times (even though Dayton and Cincinnati are only 1 minute apart).
If what the parent said was correct, then it wasn't merely because Sacramento was the capital, so my first guess would be wrong under that criteria.
And it makes sense they would list so many Ohio cities if major railroad hubs was the criteria. Ohio was practically the hub of the nation with major railroads running through all the cities you listed plus riverboats. California at this point was comparatively speaking still pretty much a backwater, even post-Gold Rush, and wasn't politically nor industrially significant before at least the first transcontinental railroad. No one in Congress had even worked particularly hard for the California EC votes until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Interestingly while I was checking the incorporation dates of Oakland and Brooklyn (now part of Oakland) I saw that 1868 is the year that Central Pacific Railroad settled on Oakland as the West Coast terminus of the first transcontinental railroad and bought the San Francisco & Oakland Railroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_and_Oakland_Rail...).