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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.
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]
In 1912, he began promoting his dream of a transcontinental highway and at a September 10 dinner meeting with industry friends in Indianapolis, he called for a coast-to-coast rock highway to be completed by May 1, 1915, in time for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. [9]
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 ...
Conceived by Indiana entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, the Lincoln Highway ran from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. Learn more about the first transcontinental highway ...
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 ...
The tracklaying race of 1869 was an unofficial contest between tracklaying crews of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, held during the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. The competition was to determine who would first reach the meeting place at Promontory, Utah. Starting in 1868, the railroad crews set, and ...
Southern Pacific was purchased by Union Pacific and acquisition was finalized in 1996. In the same year, the ATSF merged with the Burlington Northern Railroad to form BNSF Railway. With those two mergers, the two major railroads in California became Union Pacific and BNSF, with some smaller short line and switching operations. Line abandonment ...