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Infrastructure

First Transcontinental Railroad

Also Known As Pacific Railroad
Railways and Rail Transit Infrastructure

A rail line built jointly by the Union Pacific Railroad, building west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the Central Pacific Railroad, building east from Sacramento, California, joined at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory on May 10, 1869. It was the first railroad to connect the existing eastern United States network to the Pacific coast, and Chinese immigrant labor was central to completing the Central Pacific's mountain sections.

Facts
Completion Year
1869 1
Significance
Transformed the economics of the American West, which had few navigable rivers, by making profitable farming, ranching and mining possible far from tidewater; contemporaries said outright that western land had little value until the railroads reached it. 1
Connections

Exemplifies

Right of Way, Concepts

Built on right of way granted by the Pacific Railway Act land grants

Operated By

Leland Stanford, Figures

As president of the Central Pacific Railroad, the line building the western section; he presided at and personally drove the ceremonial Last Spike completing it.

Source Wikipedia: Leland Stanford
Union Pacific Railroad, Networks and Operators

Union Pacific built the eastern half, from Council Bluffs, and is this atlas's existing network entity for the line; the Central Pacific, its westward-building partner, has no live network entity on this atlas yet, a gap left for a future wave rather than invented here.

Source Wikipedia: First Transcontinental Railroad
Sources
1. Wikipedia: First Transcontinental Railroad
Wikipedia
  • Overall significance
    All that land wasn't worth ten cents until the railroads came.
  • Labor and wages
    Chinese labor proved to be Central Pacific's salvation.
  • Operated By: Union Pacific Railroad, Lead section
  • In Group: Intercity and Transcontinental Railways, Lead sentence
    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.
View the Source
Wikipedia: Leland Stanford
WikipediaOperated By: Leland StanfordView the Source
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