what were the companies that built the transcontinental railroad
First Transcontinental Railroad 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 (3,077 km) 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 132 mi (212 km) of track from Oakland/Alameda to Sacramento, California. The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California (CPRR) constructed 690 mi (1,110 km) eastward from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory (U.T.). The Union Pacific built 1,085 mi (1,746 km) from the road's eastern terminus at Council Bluffs near Omaha, Nebraska westward to Promontory Summit.[7][8][9]
San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge Tolls were subsequently raised to finance improvements to the bridge approaches, required to connect with new freeways, and to subsidize public transit in order to reduce the traffic over the bridge.
Sierra Madre Occidental Railroads came to the area starting in the 1880s and 1890s, which allowed many old mines in the region to reopen at a profit.[119] Since most of the railroads were American, the foreign influence led to unrest among the people living in the mountains, causing the Tomochic rebellion in 1892.[120] In addition to the railroads, canals were constructed in the 1890s in the Yaqui and Mayo river valleys.[121] However, these canal projects failed due to the resistance that the natives of the valleys put up against the projects.[122] Loggers began arriving in the mountains in the late 1800s. In response to the new industry, the Tarahumara moved further into the canyons.[119]
News The telegraph ushered in a new global communications regime, accompanied by a restructuring of the national postal systems, and closely followed by the advent of telephone lines. With the value of international news at a premium, governments, businesses, and news agencies moved aggressively to reduce transmission times. In 1865, Reuters had the scoop on the Lincoln assassination, reporting the news in England twelve days after the event took place.[121] In 1866, an undersea telegraph cable successfully connected Ireland to Newfoundland (and thus the Western Union network) cutting trans-Atlantic transmission time from days to hours.[122][123][124] The transatlantic cable allowed fast exchange of information about the London and New York stock exchanges, as well as the New York, Chicago, and Liverpool commodity exchanges—for the price of $5–10, in gold, per word.[125] Transmitting On 11 May 1857, a young British telegraph operator in Delhi signaled home to alert the authorities of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The rebels proceeded to disrupt the British telegraph network, which was rebuilt with more redundancies.[126] In 1902–1903, Britain and the U.S. completed the circumtelegraphy of the planet with transpacific cables from Canada to Fiji and New Zealand (British Empire), and from the USA to Hawaii and the occupied Philippines.[127] U.S. reassertions of the Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding, Latin America was a battleground of competing telegraphic interests until World War I, after which U.S. interests finally did consolidate their power in the hemisphere.[128]