The two lines of track would meet in the middle (the bill did not designate an exact location) and each company would receive 6,400 acres of land (later doubled to 12,800) and $48,000 in government bonds for every mile of track built. The Pacific Railroad Act stipulated that the Central Pacific Railroad Company would start building in Sacramento and continue east across the Sierra Nevada, while a second company, the Union Pacific Railroad, would build westward from the Missouri River, near the Iowa- Nebraska border. 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. Did you know? Before the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, it cost nearly $1,000 dollars to travel across the country.
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