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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.
Ceremony for the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, May 1869, at Promontory Summit, U.T. The Southern states had blocked westward rail expansion before 1860, but after secession the Pacific Railway Acts were passed in 1862 [37] and 1863, which respectively established the central Pacific route and the standard gauge to be used.
] The transcontinental railroad system is often used in manifest destiny imagery like John Gast's painting, American Progress where multiple locomotives are seen traveling west. [1] According to academic Dina Gilio-Whitaker , "the transcontinental railroads not only enabled [U.S. control over the continent] but also accelerated it exponentially."
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]
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 ...
Theodore Judah was born in 1826 (perhaps 1825 [1]) in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Mary (Reece) and The Rev. Henry Raymond Judah, an Episcopal clergyman. [2] After his family moved to Troy, New York, Judah attended the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then called the Rensselaer Institute in 1837 for a term [3] and developed at a young age a passion for engineering and railroads.
The Northern Pacific Railway (NP) was a transcontinental railroad that operated across the northern tier of the western states, from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest. It was approved by Congress in 1864 and given nearly 40 million acres (62,000 sq mi; 160,000 km2) of land grants, which it used to raise money in Europe for construction.
The Big Fill was an engineering project on the first transcontinental railroad in the U.S. state of Utah.To avoid a costly 800-foot (240 m) tunnel through mountainous terrain east of Promontory Summit, Central Pacific engineers mapped an alternate route that still needed to span the deep Spring Creek Ravine.