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California's symbolic and tangible connection to the rest of the country was fused at Promontory Summit, Utah, as the "last spike" was driven to join the tracks of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, thereby completing the first transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869 (before that time, only a few local rail lines operated in the ...
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]
When built, the rail line through Niles Canyon was the primary route for overland traffic to and from the San Francisco Bay. A shorter rail line between Oakland and Sacramento was established via the California Pacific Railroad and a train ferry at Benicia by 1879. As a result, the original line became less used due to its longer route and its ...
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.
In Henry T. Williams' The Pacific tourist – Williams' illustrated trans-continental guide of travel, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean published in 1878, the Big Four was replaced by the Five Associates or Representative Men of the Central Pacific Railroad, with Charles Crocker's older brother Judge Edwin B. Crocker (1818–1875), who served as the CPRR attorney from 1865 to 1869, added.
The Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) was a rail company chartered by U.S. Congress in 1862 to build a railroad eastwards from Sacramento, California, to complete most of the western part of the "First transcontinental railroad" in North America.
The General Railroad Law of California. (May 20, 1861); ... Legislative History of the First Transcontinental Railroad Congressional Globe (1850–1873) ...
In 1868 Central Pacific Railroad decided that Oakland would be the west coast terminus of the First transcontinental railroad and bought SF&O. Beginning November 8, 1869, part of the SF&O line served as the westernmost portion of the transcontinental railroad. It subsequently was absorbed into the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP).