The railroad story7/22/2023 ![]() ![]() He then headed to Washington, where he was able to convince congressional leaders as well as President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law the following year. In 1860, a young engineer named Theodore Judah identified the infamous Donner Pass in northern California (where a group of westward emigrants had become trapped in 1846) as an ideal location for constructing a railroad through the formidable Sierra Nevada mountains.īy 1861, Judah had enlisted a group of investors in Sacramento to form the Central Pacific Railroad Company. Lobbying efforts over the next several years failed due to growing sectionalism in Congress, but the idea remained a potent one. In 1845, the New York entrepreneur Asa Whitney presented a resolution in Congress proposing the federal funding of a railroad that would stretch to the Pacific. After the railroad was completed, the price dropped to $150 dollars. During that same period, the first settlers began to move westward across the United States this trend increased dramatically after the discovery of gold in California in 1848.ĮThe overland journey–across mountains, plains, rivers and deserts–was risky and difficult, and many westward migrants instead chose to travel by sea, taking the six-month route around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, or risking yellow fever and other diseases by crossing the Isthmus of Panama and traveling via ship to San Francisco.ĭid you know? Before the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, it cost nearly $1,000 dollars to travel across the country. By 1850, some 9,000 miles of track had been laid east of the Missouri River. Īmerica’s first steam locomotive made its debut in 1830, and over the next two decades, railroad tracks linked many cities on the East Coast. Building of the Transcontinental Railroad, circa 1869.
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