Trains. Electronic Edition
Book Description
Description of American trains and railroads, with numerous photographs, Includes: rails and steam, American beginnings, across the Mississippi, the transcontinental dream, the railroad in the American civil war, competition and regulation, including lisst of freight car initials. The First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States was built across North America in the 1860s, linking the rail...
MoreDescription of American trains and railroads, with numerous photographs, Includes: rails and steam, American beginnings, across the Mississippi, the transcontinental dream, the railroad in the American civil war, competition and regulation, including lisst of freight car initials. The First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States was built across North America in the 1860s, linking the railroad network of the eastern U.S. with California on the Pacific coast. Finished on May 10, 1869 at the famous Golden spike event at Promontory Summit, Utah, it created a nationwide mechanized transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West, catalyzing the transition from the wagon trains of previous decades to a modern transportation system. Although an accomplishment, it achieved the status of first transcontinental railroad by connecting myriad eastern US railroads to the Pacific and was not the largest single railroad system in the world. Celebration of the meeting of the railroad in Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869.
Authorized by the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and heavily backed by the federal government, it was the culmination of a decades-long movement to build such a line and was one of the crowning achievements of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, completed four years after his death. The building of the railroad required enormous feats of engineering and labor in the crossing of plains and high mountains by the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad, the two federally chartered enterprises that built the line westward and eastward respectively. The building of the railroad was motivated in part to bind the Union together during the strife of the American Civil War. It substantially accelerated the populating of the West by white homesteaders, led to rapid cultivation of new farm lands. The Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroad combined operations in 1870 and formally merged in 1885
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