First Transcontinental Railroad

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The line opened in 1869 at Promontory Summit

The First Transcontinental Railroad (originally Pacific Railroad , later called Overland Route ; German First Transcontinental Railroad ) is a name for the rail link between Omaha and Sacramento. The 3069 kilometer long route connected the settlement areas on the Missouri River with California since May 11, 1869 .

The connection was licensed by the Pacific Railroad Acts of the American Congress . The railway lines Sacramento – Ogden (CP, 1110 kilometers) and Omaha – Ogden (UP, 1746 kilometers), built between 1863 and 1869 by the railway companies Central Pacific Railroad (CP) and Union Pacific Railroad (UP ), met on May 10, 1869 on Promontory Summit . The total length of the railway line was thus 2846 km. The gap to the rest of the United States' rail network was made possible with the completion of the Union Pacific Missouri River Bridge in 1873.

Route profile from Omaha to San Francisco. Harper's Weekly December 7, 1867

An earlier "transcontinental" railway line in America existed since 1855 with the Panama Railway , which connected the Atlantic coast with the Pacific coast (only 76 kilometers away) . However, the First Transcontinental Railroad made it possible for the first time to have an extensive east-west rail link across five states within the United States and is therefore an important milestone in the history of the railroad in North America .

Movies

  • Hell on Wheels five-season television series (United States 2011-2016)

literature

  • Gordon H. Chang, Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Eds.): The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. Stanford University Press, Stanford 2019, ISBN 978-1-5036-0925-9

Web links

Wikisource: Theodor Kirchhoff: The iron double belt of the Union (1869)  - sources and full texts
Commons : First Transcontinental Railroad  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bowman, JN Driving the Last Spike at Promontary , 1869 California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, June 1957, pp. 96-106 and Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, September 1957, pp. 263-274 .
  2. ^ Executive Order of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, Fixing the Point of Commencement of the Union Pacific Railroad at Council Bluffs, Iowa. dated March 7, 1864. (38th Congress, 1st Session SENATE Ex. Doc. No. 27)
  3. ^ Cooper, Bruce C., "Riding the Transcontinental Rails: Overland Travel on the Pacific Railroad 1865-1881" (2005), Polyglot Press, Philadelphia ISBN 1-4115-9993-4 . p. 11
  4. ↑ Appleton's Railway and Steam Navigation Guide New York: D. Appleton & Co., December, 1870, p. 236