Infrastructure
First Transcontinental Railroad
Also Known As Pacific Railroad
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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 SignificanceTransformed 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 Cross-Tradition Connections
Operated By
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.
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.
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