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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]
The original "golden spike", on display at the Cantor Arts Museum at Stanford University. The Golden Spike (also known as The Last Spike [1]) is the ceremonial 17.6-karat gold final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha on ...
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.
National Park Service map of Golden Spike National Historical Park. The Golden Spike National Historical Park encompasses 2,735 acres (1,107 ha). Initially just 7 acres (2.8 ha) when it was established in 1957, limited to the area near the junction of the two rail systems, the site was expanded by 2,176 acres (881 ha) in 1965 through land swaps and acquisition of approximately a strip of land ...
The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869; completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. Central Pacific Railroad (left), meets Union Pacific Railroad (right) and exchange bottles of water from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. [s 2] [s 4]
Collis Potter Huntington (October 22, 1821 – August 13, 1900) [2] was an American industrialist and railway magnate. He was one of the Big Four of western railroading (along with Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker) who invested in Theodore Judah's idea to build the Central Pacific Railroad as part of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. [3]
Some of the UP crews who were denied a chance to break the CP record later worked on the Kansas Pacific, who set a new record with 10 miles 1,320 feet (16.496 km) laid in a single day at Comanche Crossing near Strasburg, Colorado on August 15, 1870, [e] completing the first continuous transcontinental railroad.
Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad is a book written by David Haward Bain, [2] published in 2000. It follows the initial conception of the idea of a transcontinental railroad, during the two decades before the Civil War, [3] to the work of the engineers and entrepreneurs who fixed the route, assembled financing, drafted a work force and launched the two lines toward ...