Ad
related to: transcontinental railroad acts summary
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 were a series of acts of Congress that promoted the construction of a "transcontinental railroad" (the Pacific Railroad) in the United States through authorizing the issuance of government bonds and the grants of land to railroad companies.
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.
This legislation formed the basis of the Pacific Railway Acts enacted in 1862, which granted a charter to the Union Pacific Railroad Company to construct the first transcontinental railroad in the United States and to provide federal support in the form of land grants and bond subsidies.
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 Pacific Railroad Surveys (1853–1855) were a series of explorations of the American West designed to find and document possible routes for a transcontinental railroad across North America. The expeditions included surveyors, scientists, and artists and resulted in an immense body of data covering at least 400,000 square miles (1,000,000 km ...
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 Santa Fe Railroad Company also completed a railroad across Northern Arizona, via Holbrook, Winslow, Flagstaff and Kingman in August 1883. [63] These two transcontinental railroads, the Southern Pacific (now part of the Union Pacific Railroad) and the Santa Fe (now part of the BNSF), are among the busiest rail lines in the United States.
Douglas introduced the bill intending to open up new lands to develop and facilitate the construction of a transcontinental railroad. However, the Kansas–Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, stoking national tensions over slavery and contributing to a series of armed conflicts known as "Bleeding Kansas".