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Virginian 4, the last surviving steam engine of the Virginian Railway, on display at the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke, Virginia.. Early in the 20th century, William Nelson Page, a civil engineer and coal mining manager, joined forces with a silent partner, industrialist financier Henry Huttleston Rogers (a principal of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest men in the world ...
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 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 first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Railroads played a large role in the development of the United States from the Industrial Revolution in the Northeast (1820s–1850s) to the settlement of the West (1850s–1890s).
The railroad, one of the later developed in Virginia, became important to many communities, opening transportation options, and stimulating commerce and military operations on the Peninsula throughout the 20th century. Over 125 years after it opened, many of the stations are gone. Spur lines have both come and gone.
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]
Historian Theodore Kornweibel estimated that more than 10,000 enslaved workers a year built the southern railroads between 1857 and 1865.
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 ...