Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When was the first US transcontinental railroad completed?
The First Transcontinental Railroad (also called the Great Transcontinental Railroad, known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route") was a 1,912-mile (3,077km) continuous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay.[1] The rail line was built by three private companies over public lands provided by extensive US land grants.[2] Construction was financed by both state and US government subsidy bonds as well as by company issued mortgage bonds.[3][4][5][N 1] The Western Pacific Railroad Company built 132mi (212km) of track from Oakland/Alameda to Sacramento, California. The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California (CPRR) constructed 690mi (1,110km) eastward from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory (U.T.). The Union Pacific built 1,085mi (1,746km) from the road's eastern terminus at Council Bluffs near Omaha, Nebraska westward to Promontory Summit.[7][8][9]
Charles E. Stanton was born in Monticello, Illinois on November 22, 1858. As a boy he was raised in part along the roadbed of the Union Pacific Railroad during its construction as part of the First Transcontinental Railroad; his father ran businesses that catered to the construction crews, and was operating the railroad hotel at Promontory, Utah when the railroad was completed in 1869. At the ceremony on Promontory Summit where engines of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroad touched cowcatchers to symbolize the opening of the transcontinental route, Stanton rode in the UP's engine and rang the engine's bell.
The Jupiter (officially known as Central Pacific Railroad #60) was a 4-4-0 steam locomotive owned by the Central Pacific Railroad. It made history when it joined the Union Pacific "No. 119") at Promontory Summit, Utah, during the Golden Spike ceremony commemorating the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869.
A series of transcontinental railroads built over the last third of the 19th century created a nationwide transportation network that united the country by rail. The first of these, the "Pacific Railroad", was built by the Central Pacific Railroad and Union Pacific Railroad to link the San Francisco Bay at Alameda, California, with the nation's existing eastern railroad network at Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, thereby creating the world's first transcontinental railroad when it opened in 1869. Its construction was made possible by the US government under Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862, 1864, and 1867.
Abe Wheeler continues to work on the railroad until the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed on May 10, 1869, when the driving of the Golden Spike joins the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit in Utah. Abe parts company with Chow-Ping.
The first attempt to build a modern trade route through the area is credited to William Jackson Palmer, founder of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (D&RG). Palmer started a project in 1880 to make what had been a local railroad from Colorado into a transcontinental railroad empire. This would mean a second transcontinental railroad would be built across Utah. This would also place the D&RG in competition with the First Transcontinental Railroad, then operated by Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad.
Disagreements in the company led to two proposals. Both proposals called for extending the railroad west from Colorado as far as what is now Green River. West of Green River a "northern route" would extend the railroad towards Ogden, Utah, there connecting with the established Overland Route. This proposal was eventually completed as the Utah Division, loosely following the route of modern U.S. Route 6 across eastern Utah. This line soon became the main line of the D&RG and remains one of the main transcontinental rail arteries of the U.S, now operated by the Union Pacific Railroad as the Central Corridor.
These combined stage and Pony Express stations along the Central Route across Utah and Nevada were joined by the first transcontinental telegraph stations (completed October 24, 1861). This combination wagon-stagecoach-pony express-telegraph line route is labeled the "Pony Express National Historic Trail" on the National Trail Map. From Salt Lake City, the telegraph line followed much of the Mormon-California-Oregon trail(s) to Omaha, Nebraska. After the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the telegraph lines along the railroad tracks became the main line, since the required relay stations, lines and telegraph operators were much easier to supply and maintain along the railroad. The telegraph lines that diverged from the railroad lines or significant population centers were largely abandoned.
The first railroad ferries on San Francisco Bay were established by the San Francisco and Oakland Railroad and the San Francisco and Alameda Railroad (SF&A) which were taken over by the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) in 1870 to become an integral part of the First Transcontinental Railroad. The earliest railroad ferries ran from Oakland Point and from Alameda Terminal when Alameda was still a peninsula. The ferry pier at Oakland Point was greatly enlarged to form the Oakland Long Wharf. These railroad ferries mostly carried passengers, not trains, although there was some ferrying of freight cars to San Francisco. When the Central Pacific re-routed the Sacramento to Oakland segment of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1876, a ferry across the Carquinez Strait was established, and the world's largest ferryboat, the Solano was built (later joined by a sister ferry, the slightly larger "Contra Costa"), to serve the crossing. This railroad ferry actually carried whole trains of up to 48 freight cars or 24 passenger cars with their locomotives. These ferries became part of the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) when it assumed many of the facilities of its affiliate, the Central Pacific. These large train ferries were idled when a railway bridge was completed over the Carquinez Strait in November, 1930.
The company was incorporated in 1869, and completed the line in January 1870. At the time the First Transcontinental Railroad was being built, Brigham Young felt slighted by Union Pacific officials who had decided not to build the railroad through Salt Lake. "We want [the railroad] in this city where it belongs," he said on one occasion to the Mormons in Salt Lake, "the attempt to carry it in that [north] direction is an insult to the people of this city, for in so doing they have tried to shun us." Consequently, Brigham Young formed his own company, the Utah Central Railroad, in order to connect Salt Lake to the Transcontinental Railroad in Ogden, forty miles to the north. 
The route of modern I-80 was also previously used for the construction of two transcontinental railroads. The First Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, closely followed the main line of the California Trail and I-80 west of Wells. The Feather River Route was constructed in 1909 and generally follows the Hastings Cutoff through Eastern Nevada. It also runs parallel to I-80 in Nevada east of Winnemucca.
In the fall of 1856 he retired as minister to Mexico, and returned to Charleston where Gadsden died in 1858. The sectional crisis of the late 1850s and subsequent Civil War delayed construction of a proposed southern transcontinental railroad to California along the 32d parallel, just to the north of the Mexican border. Between 1878 and 1881, though, the Southern Pacific Railroad (now part of the Union Pacific Railroad) built the section of the southern transcontinental between Yuma and El Paso within the Gadsden Purchase territory. At the same time, 1880-1882, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad completed a transcontinental link through the Gadsden Purchase and then southwest to a terminus at the port of Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. Completed October 25, 1882, this line was later acquired by the Southern Pacific. Today, the rail link across the Gadsden Purchase on the southern transcontinental is one of the busiest in the Western Hemisphere.
The Western Pacific Railroad (1862-1870) had surveyed a line from San Jose via Niles Canyon and Altamont Pass to Sacramento, but ran out of money after laying track from San Jose to Niles. A CP subsidiary then purchased the line and completed it, adding a line from Niles toward Oakland. In 1869 this line was first connected to the SF&A and then to the SF&O. On the morning of November 8, 1869, the first transcontinental train to use the expanded ferry terminal at Oakland Point traversed the SF&O and the Western Pacific Railroad to get to Sacramento and continue east on the Central Pacific Railroad. The city of Oakland held a large celebration later in the day to greet the first westbound transcontinental train.
The ultimate competitor to the California Trail showed up in 1869 when the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed. The combined Central Pacific Railroad and Union Pacific Railroad carried traffic from the East into California, and the Virginia and Truckee Railroad carried traffic from Reno to Virginia City. The trip from Omaha, Nebraska to California became faster, cheaper, and safer, with a typical trip taking only seven days and a $65 (economy) fare. Even before completion, sections of the railroad were used to haul freight and people around Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. The price of many goods imported from the east dropped by 20–50% as the much cheaper transportation costs were mostly passed on to the consumers. The California trail was used after 1869 by a few intrepid travelers, but it mostly reverted to local traffic traveling to towns or locations along the trail.
Later Ogden served on the board of the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad and lobbied with many others for congressional approval and funding of the transcontinental railroad. After the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, Ogden was named as the first president of the Union Pacific Railroad. Ogden was a good choice for the first president, but his railroad experience was most likely not the primary reason he was chosen; Ogden was a clever man who had many political connections. When Ogden came to lead the Union Pacific, the railroad wasn't fully funded and hadn't yet laid a single mile of track—the railroad existed largely on paper created by an act of Congress. As part of the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, Congress named several existing railroad companies to complete portions of the project. Several key areas needed to link the East (Chicago) to the West had none, and hence the Union Pacific was formed by Congress. Ogden was a fierce supporter of the transcontinental railroad at a time of great unrest for the country and was quoted as saying
Cooper, Bruce C., (2005), Polyglot Press, Philadelphia ISBN1-4115-9993-4 Cooper, Bruce Clement (Ed), "The Classic Western American Railroad Routes". New York: Chartwell Books/Worth Press, 2010. ISBN978-0-7858-2573-9; ISBN0-7858-2573-8; BINC: 3099794. Duran, Xavier, "The First U.S. Transcontinental Railroad: Expected Profits and Government Intervention," Journal of Economic History, 73 (March 2013), 177–200. Cite uses deprecated parameter |deadurl= (help) White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2010) Willumson, Glenn. Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press; 2013) 242 pages; studies the production, distribution, and publication of images of the railroad in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 2015, a Lego model depicting the Golden Spike Ceremony, the event that symbolically marked the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, was submitted to the Lego Ideas website.[102][103]
The Kansas Pacific Railway (KP) was a historic railroad company that operated in the western United States in the late 19th century. It was a federally chartered railroad, backed with government land grants. At a time when the first transcontinental railroad was being constructed by the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, it tried and failed to join the transcontinental ranks. It was originally the "Union Pacific, Eastern Division", although it was completely independent. The Pennsylvania railroad, working with Missouri financiers, designed it as a feeder line to the transcontinental system. The owners lobbied heavily in Washington for money to build a railroad from Kansas City to Colorado, and then to California. It failed to get funding to go west of Colorado. It operated many of the first long-distance lines in the state of Kansas in the 1870s, extending the national railway network westward across that state and into Colorado. Its main line furnished a principal transportation route that opened up settlement of the central Great Plains, and its link from Kansas City to Denver provided the last link in the coast-to-coast railway network in 1870. The railroad was consolidated with the Union Pacific in 1880, and its mainline continues to be an integral part of the Union Pacific network today.
At the same time, 1879-1881, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad was building across New Mexico and met the Southern Pacific at Deming, New Mexico March 7, 1881, completing the second transcontinental railroad (the first, the central transcontinental, was completed May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah). Acquiring trackage rights over the SP, from Deming to Benson, the Santa Fe then built a line southwest to Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, completed October 1882, as its first outlet to the Pacific. This line was later sold to the Southern Pacific. The Southern Pacific continued building east from El Paso, completing a junction with the Texas & Pacific in December 1881, and finally in 1883, its own southern transcontinental, the Sunset Route, California to New Orleans, Atlantic waters to the Pacific. These railroads caused an early 1880s mining boom in such locales as Tombstone, Arizona, Bisbee, Arizona, and Santa Rita, New Mexico, the latter two world class copper producers. From Bisbee, a third sub-transcontinental was built across the Gadsden Purchase, the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, to El Paso by 1905, then to a link with the Rock Island line to form the Golden State Route. The EP&SW was sold to the Southern Pacific in the early 1920s.
A Pacific Railroad train did eventually reach Jefferson City four months later, but St. Louis' plan to be the starting point of the transcontinental railroad was unsuccessful. In 1869, the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, stretching from San Francisco to Chicago. The Pacific Railroad was renamed Missouri Pacific in 1867 and later became a part of Union Pacific in 1982.
The Santa Fe Trail was the 19th-century US territory's vital commercial and military highway link to the Eastern United States. All with termini in Northern New Mexico, the Camino Real, the Santa Fe Trail and the Old Spanish Trail are all recognized as National Historic Trails. New Mexico's latitude and low passes made it an attractive east-west transportation corridor. As a territory, the Gadsden Purchase increased New Mexico's land area for the purpose of the construction of a southern transcontinental railroad, that of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Another transcontinental railroad was completed by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The railroads essentially replaced the earlier trails but brought on a population boom. Early transcontinental auto trails later crossed the state bringing more migrants. Railroads were later supplemented or replaced by a system of highways and airports. Today, New Mexico's Interstate Highways approximate the earlier land routes of the Camino Real, the Santa Fe Trail and the transcontinental railroads.
The first railroad in Sacramento as well as California was the Sacramento Valley Railroad finished in 1856 and engineered by Theodore Judah. Judah's efforts to realize a transcontinental railroad was transferred to the power of "The Big Four" investors, who created the Central Pacific Railroad. The First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, when Central Pacific's line joined Union Pacific's at Promontory Summit. Sacramento's terminus was the primary departure station for the railroad until 1883.
Rocklin's history is closely tied to the transcontinental railroad. In 1862, the Pacific Railroad Act granted the Central Pacific Railroad land near Secret Ravine. In 1864, the Central Pacific Railroad completed an extension of its track southwest from Newcastle to Secret Ravine. It named the area Rocklin after its granite quarry, and used the site as a refueling and water stop. The Central Pacific built a roundhouse in 1867. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, significantly increasing railroad traffic through the town. According to the 1870 census, Rocklin had grown to 542 residents, and the majority of Irish immigrants had foregone mining and were working for the railroad. In 1906 the Central Pacific moved its facility from Rocklin to Roseville, where more land was available for expansion. The site in Roseville has remained in continuous use since. As of August 2014, it is the largest rail facility near the US West Coast.
The completion of Canada's first transcontinental railroad with the driving of the Last Spike at Craigellachie, British Columbia, on November 7, 1885, is an important milestone in Canadian history. Between 1881 and 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) completed a line that spanned from the port of Montreal to the Pacific coast, fulfilling a condition of British Columbia's 1871 entry into the Canadian Confederation. The City of Vancouver, incorporated in 1886, was designated the western terminus of the line. The CPR became the first transcontinental railway company in North America in 1889 after its International Railway of Maine opened, connecting CPR to the Atlantic coast.
Unfortunately Chorpenning also had his mail contract annulled in 1860, largely for political reasons. Companies headed by William Hepburn Russell took over the route, and used Chorpenning's way stations to establish the short-lived Pony Express mail service. The Pony Express became obsolete in late 1861 when the First Transcontinental Telegraph, also using Chorpenning's route and way stations, became operational. Transportation along Chorpenning's central route continued until the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869.
When the last spike was driven, the rail network was not yet connected to the Atlantic or Pacific but merely connected Omaha to Sacramento. To get from Sacramento to the Pacific, the Central Pacific purchased the struggling Western Pacific Railroad (unrelated to the railroad of the same name that would later parallel its route) and resumed construction on it, which had halted in 1866 due to funding troubles. In November 1869, the Central Pacific finally connected Sacramento to the east side of San Francisco Bay by rail at Oakland, California, where freight and passengers completed their transcontinental link to the city by ferry.