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America's first transcontinental railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route") was a 1,911-mile (3,075 km) continuous railroad line built between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa, with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay. [1]
A transcontinental railroad or transcontinental railway is contiguous railroad trackage [1] that crosses a continental land mass and has terminals at different oceans or continental borders. Such networks may be via the tracks of a single railroad, or via several railroads owned or controlled by multiple railway companies along a continuous route.
The map shows the first transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869. Railroads in the United States in 1890. The low-cost of rail transportation, which was a small fraction of what it had been with wagon transport, resulted in a tremendous increase in all types of economic activity (such as farming, mining and ranching), particularly ...
Running from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle, Washington, it was the creation of 19th-century railroad entrepreneur James J. Hill and was developed from the Saint Paul & Pacific Railroad. The Great Northern's route was the northernmost transcontinental railroad route in the U.S.
The original company, Union Pacific Rail Road (UPRR), was created and funded by the federal government by Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864. The laws were passed as war measures to forge closer ties with California and Oregon, which otherwise took six months to reach.
The first bore through the Sierras, Tunnel Number 6, was built as part of the first transcontinental railroad.In 1901, Southern Pacific Company proposed building a long tunnel via a new alignment to both lower the track elevation and cut several miles off of the Donner Pass route. [3]
Construction of the road was financed primarily by 30-year, 6% U.S. government bonds authorized by Sec. 5 of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862.They were issued at the rate of $16,000 ($265,000 in 2017 dollars) per mile of tracked grade completed east of the designated base of the Sierra Nevada range near Roseville, CA where California state geologist Josiah Whitney had determined were the ...
However, no route or bill could be agreed upon and passed authorizing the Government's financial support and land grants until the secession of the southern states in 1861 removed their opposition to a central route. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 (12 Stat. 489) was the original act.