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The Official "Date of Completion" of the Transcontinental Railroad under the Provisions of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, et seq., as Established by the Supreme Court of the United States to be November 6, 1869. (99 U.S. 402) 1879 Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum
July 1 – Joseph Hamilton Beattie succeeds John Viret Gooch as locomotive engineer for London and South Western Railway. July 4 – Chile: The first section of the Copiapó-Caldera railway line – the second in South America – between Caldera and Monte Amargo is inaugurated today in honour of the nationality of William Wheelwright, the American businessman responsible for the project.
The first of the Pacific Railroad Acts is signed into law by President Lincoln, authorizing the issuance of land grants, government bonds, and rights-of-way to two newly incorporated railroad companies, Union Pacific and Central Pacific, for the purpose of constructing the western half of the nation's first transcontinental railroad.
The golden spike event in Utah the previous year had marked the linking of the Union Pacific with the Central Pacific Railroad, but until 1872, passengers were required to disembark between Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska, to cross the Missouri River by boat. [2] A 1878 map shows principal cities and towns along the railroad.
The grant was part of the Land Grant Act of 1850, which provided 3.75 million acres of land to support railroad projects. The Illinois Central received nearly 2.6 million acres of land in Illinois. [3] The main laws, known as the Pacific Railroad Acts, were passed in 1862. [4]
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 ...
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 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.