With the addition of British Columbia, Canada extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To maintain that vast area and to ensure its independence from the United States, it was necessary to build a railway to the west coast. In 1872 an effort…

… posed a serious obstacle to transcontinental planning. British Columbia, then a British crown colony, was concerned about the impact of an influx of gold prospectors from the United States, and it sought to join the Canadian confederation. In 1871 Prime Minister John A. Macdonald offered British Columbia a railroad connection…

…part of the first American transcontinental rail line. The line was first conceived and surveyed by an engineer, Theodore Dehone Judah, who obtained the financial backing of the California group and won federal support in the form of the Pacific Railway Act (1862), which provided land grants and subsidies to…

The first public proposal for such a line was made by the New York City merchant Asa Whitney in 1844. At that time the United States did not hold outright possession of land west of the Rockies, though it exercised joint occupation of…

…together would provide the first railroad link between the Mississippi valley and the Pacific coast. One was the Union Pacific, to run westward from Council Bluffs, Iowa; the other was the Central Pacific, to run eastward from Sacramento, California. To encourage the rapid completion of those roads, Congress provided generous…

…for the construction of a transcontinental railroad across the United States.

…1861 it completed the first transcontinental telegraph line, connecting San Francisco to the Midwest and then on to the East Coast. After the Union Pacific Railroad was finished in 1869, much of the line was relocated to run along the railroad right-of-way to facilitate maintenance.

…Company, company that extended the American railway system to the Pacific Coast; it was incorporated by an act of the U.S. Congress on July 1, 1862. The original rail line was built westward 1,006 miles (1,619 km) from Omaha, Nebraska, to meet the Central Pacific, which was being built eastward…