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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]
The first transcontinental railroad in Europe, that connected the North Sea or the English Channel with the Mediterranean Sea, was a series of lines that included the Paris–Marseille railway, in service 1856. Multiple railways north of Paris were in operation at that time, such as Paris–Lille railway and Paris–Le Havre railway.
1838 – The world's first railroad junction is formed in Branchville, South Carolina. The railroad company extended its existing rail that ran between Charleston and the Savannah River to the north toward Orangeburg and Columbia. Both rail lines closely paralleled old Native American trails. 1838 – Edmondson railway ticket introduced.
A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825–1862 (University Press of Kansas; 2010) 325 pages; Documents the enthusiasm that accompanied the advent of the railroad system; Nice, David C. Amtrak: The History and Politics of a National Railroad (1998) online edition Archived 2011-06-04 at the Wayback Machine
"A Macro-scale Look at Railroad History." Railroad History (Fall/Winter 2012), Issue 207, pp 78–89. Riegel, Robert Edgar. The Story of the Western Railroads (1926) online; Saunders, Richard. Main lines: Rebirth of the North American railroads, 1970–2002 (Northern Illinois UP, 2003). Stover, John. History of the Illinois Central Railroad ...
Construction of the road was financed primarily by 30-year, 6% U.S. government bonds authorized by Sec. 5 of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862.They were issued at the rate of $16,000 ($265,000 in 2017 dollars) per mile of tracked grade completed east of the designated base of the Sierra Nevada range near Roseville, CA where California state geologist Josiah Whitney had determined were the ...
Asa Whitney (1797–1872) was a highly successful dry-goods merchant and transcontinental railroad promoter. [1] He was one of the first backers of an American transcontinental railway. A trip to China in 1842–44 impressed upon Whitney the need for a transcontinental railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific. [2] [3]
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 ...