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Although the transcontinental railroads dominated the media, with the completion of the First transcontinental railroad in 1869 dramatically symbolizing the nation's unification after the divisiveness of the Civil War, most construction actually took place in the industrial Northeast and agricultural Midwest, and was designed to minimize ...
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 railway thus was a military necessity. [7] The transcontinental link finally became operational in May 1869, four years after the Civil War ended. [8] Nationwide, railroad mileage doubled from 35,085 miles in 1865 to 70,268 in 1873. [9]
The Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 were a series of acts of Congress that promoted the construction of a "transcontinental railroad" (the Pacific Railroad) in the United States through authorizing the issuance of government bonds and the grants of land to railroad companies. In 1853, the War Department under then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ...
The Pacific Railroad was renamed Missouri Pacific in 1867 and later became a part of Union Pacific in 1982. [5] In 1861, the Gasconade River Bridge was one of those burned in Missouri's conflict with secessionists in the early days of the Civil War. Gov.
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 construction of another transcontinental railroad using the Texas and Pacific in the South, part of the "Scott Plan", proposed by Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who initiated negotiations resulting in the final compromise; Legislation to industrialize the South and restore its economy following the Civil War and ...
The Pacific Railroad Surveys (1853–1855) were a series of explorations of the American West designed to find and document possible routes for a transcontinental railroad across North America. The expeditions included surveyors, scientists, and artists and resulted in an immense body of data covering at least 400,000 square miles (1,000,000 km ...