Central Pacific Railroad: Map, History, Facts, Logo
Last revised: September 15, 2026
By: Adam Burns
The Central Pacific was the western half of the first Pacific Railroad, and a California company before it was a federal project. Theodore D. Judah located a line over Donner Pass. Four Sacramento merchants—Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker—put up the money. They incorporated on June 28, 1861. Ground was broken on the Sacramento waterfront on January 8, 1863. The first rails went down October 26. Judah was already dying in New York and never saw a locomotive on his railroad. Chinese labor took the company through the Sierra. The rails met the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, on May 10, 1869. That meeting is the transcontinental page. This page is the company: Sacramento to the summit, the Big Four, the Southern Pacific lease of April 1, 1885, and a paper corporation that lasted until June 30, 1959. Union Pacific still runs Judah’s mountain.
The replica of Central Pacific 4-4-0 #60, the “Jupiter,” at the Golden Spike National Historic Site in Promontory Summit, Utah circa 1982. This replica was completed by O’Connor Engineering in 1975 while the original was built by the Schenectady Locomotive Works of Schenectady, New York in 1868. American-Rails.com collection.
On this page: At a glance · Judah and the Big Four · The Pacific Railway Act · Sacramento, Cape Horn, the Governor Stanford · The Sierra · Nevada, the ten-mile day, Promontory · Southern Pacific and what remains
At a glance
The Central Pacific Railroad logo. Author’s work.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Sacramento, California |
| States | California, Nevada, Utah Territory |
| Incorporated | June 28, 1861, Central Pacific Railroad of California |
| The Four | Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker |
| Engineer | Theodore D. Judah. Died November 2, 1863, age 37 |
| Ground broken | January 8, 1863, Front and K Streets, Sacramento |
| First rails / first locomotive | October 26, 1863. Governor Stanford (Norris 4-4-0, 1862), November 10, 1863 |
| Pacific Railway Act | Lincoln signed July 1, 1862. CP accepted October 7; Interior December 24. Amended July 2, 1864 |
| Promontory | May 10, 1869. About 690 miles from Sacramento |
| Ten-mile day | April 28, 1869: 10 miles 56 feet |
| Gauge | 4 feet 8½ inches |
| Southern Pacific lease | April 1, 1885 |
| Corporate end | Dissolved June 30, 1959 |
| Historic mark | CP (not Canadian Pacific) |
| Successor | Southern Pacific, then Union Pacific. Donner is still a UP main |
| Preserved engines | Governor Stanford at the California State Railroad Museum. The 4-2-4T C.P. Huntington. Jupiter replica at Golden Spike National Historical Park |
Mileage, tunnel, and labor figures follow the transcontinental encyclopedia on this site. Bond and land figures are the acts of 1862 and 1864. Information compiled September 15, 2026.
Judah and the Big Four
Judah was a Rensselaer-trained civil engineer who had already built California’s first railroad, the Sacramento Valley. He was sure a locomotive could climb the Sierra at Donner Pass, the only natural gap in that granite wall. In 1859 he went to Washington to say so. On January 14, 1860, he opened a “Pacific Railroad Museum” in the Capitol. Congress was slow. He sailed home, ran the line himself, and on November 1, 1860, wrote a loose incorporation. San Francisco would not touch it. Sacramento would.
Four merchants put up the cash California law required—$1,000 a mile, $115,000 to start. Huntington and Hopkins kept a hardware store. Stanford sold groceries and ran for office. Crocker sold dry goods. They incorporated the Central Pacific Railroad of California on June 28, 1861, directed to construct a railroad and telegraph “from the Pacific coast, at or near San Francisco, or the navigable waters of the Sacramento River, to the eastern boundary of California.” Stanford was elected governor that fall. Huntington went east and stayed there, buying iron, locomotives, and votes. Crocker took construction. Hopkins kept the books. They are the Big Four. Their biographies are their own pages. Judah was the engineer who had made them possible, and they squeezed him out of the decisions.
He sailed for New York on October 3, 1863, hoping to find a backer who would buy the Four out. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s name is the one that attached itself to that trip. How interested the Commodore really was is not clear. Nothing came of it. Judah caught yellow fever crossing Panama and died at the Metropolitan Hotel on November 2, 1863, age thirty-seven. The railroad was built on his maps. He never rode it over the summit.
The Pacific Railway Act
Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of War, had sent Army parties across the West in 1853. Slavery made a choice of corridor impossible. Lincoln’s election and secession took Southern votes out of the room. The central route—Omaha up the Platte, a meeting somewhere in the basin—was what remained. Grenville M. Dodge had already walked that eastern half. The surveys, the statute, and the spike as a national event are the transcontinental page. What the act did for this company is simpler.
Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act on July 1, 1862. It created Union Pacific as a federal corporation and authorized the already-chartered Central Pacific to build east from the Sacramento. The House had passed it May 6, 79–49; the Senate June 20, 35–5. Central Pacific accepted the agreement on October 7 and filed with the Interior Department on December 24. Land came in a checkerboard: ten alternate sections a mile in 1862, about 6,400 acres on paper; the amending act of July 2, 1864 doubled that to twenty sections, about 12,800 acres, and let the companies issue their own first-mortgage bonds up to the same amounts as the government issue. Bonds were $16,000 a mile on easy ground, $32,000 between the ranges, $48,000 in designated mountain miles—a loan, not a gift. The company had to finish 50 miles in two years, 50 a year after that, and the whole job by July 1, 1876, or lose the incentives. John Stover put the land-grant era in scale: between 1850 and 1871 the government offered on the order of 170 million acres for some eighty railroad projects; about 131 million acres were actually used.
Sacramento, Cape Horn, the Governor Stanford
A replica of the Central Pacific depot in Old Sacramento, seen here at the California State Railroad Museum circa 1976. The original was completed during the 1860s and appears here as it would have circa 1876. William Myers photo. American-Rails.com collection.
Ground was broken on January 8, 1863, at Front and K Streets on the Sacramento River. Only Stanford and Crocker of the founders were there. Huntington was in New York buying material. Judah was in the Sierra. Hopkins did not bother. Everything the company needed except timber and granite came about 15,000 miles around Cape Horn, or across Panama, in ships Huntington kept on the water. Union Pacific could have iron dumped at Omaha. Central Pacific could not.
Brian Solomon, in Southern Pacific Railroad, notes that real grading lagged the ceremony by some ten months. First rails went down October 26, 1863, a few blocks to 21st Street. The company’s first locomotive, the 4-4-0 Governor Stanford, an 1862 Norris product of about 46 tons, made its first run over that track on November 10. Judah had been dead eight days. The engine is at the California State Railroad Museum. On March 25, 1864, it hauled granite and earned the company its first freight money. Service reached Auburn, at the foot of the Sierra, on May 13, 1865—about 35 miles in two years. From there the line followed the North Fork of the American River through Colfax, Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap toward Donner.
The Sierra
White labor would not stay in the mountains. James Harvey Strobridge, Crocker’s construction boss, tried fifty Chinese workers in 1865 as an experiment. They stayed. They drilled, they hauled, they laid, they cooked, and they did it for less money than the Irish gangs—commonly $26 to $35 a month against $35 plus board. By 1868 the Central Pacific had on the order of 10,000 to 12,000 Chinese on the payroll, first from California and then by recruitment from Guangdong, about 80 to 90 percent of the force. Stanford later told the federal government that without them the western half of the national highway could not have been finished. How many died in the Sierra is not known. Hundreds is the cautious floor. The company did not keep a proper count.
Fifteen tunnels were driven through granite with black powder, hand steel, and, from 1867, nitroglycerin mixed on the work. Summit Tunnel (Tunnel 6), at Donner Pass, was 1,659 feet long and as much as 124 feet deep in solid rock. Work began August 27, 1866. The heading holed through in August 1867. Rails were in on November 30, 1867. Elevation at the summit is 7,042 feet. Graders had already been sent ahead into Nevada because the bore had stopped the track. Snowsheds eventually covered some thirty-seven to forty miles of the mountain district so the line could run in winter at all. The tunnel-by-tunnel list and the pass as an operating mountain are the Donner and transcontinental pages. This was the company’s hardest money.
Nevada, the ten-mile day, Promontory
Central Pacific main line, Sacramento to Promontory Summit. American-Rails.com collection.
This 1870 system map depicts the Central Pacific only a year after operations began. Author’s collection.
Once Summit Tunnel had rail, the pace changed. Central Pacific reached Reno on June 18, 1868, 154 miles from Sacramento. The Humboldt Desert was alkali, heat, and no timber—not granite. The 1870 map on this page is the company a year after the spike: California, Nevada, Utah, and the Bay still filling in.
Track-laying of the Central Pacific across the open desert of Nevada during 1868.
The 1862 act never named a meeting point. By 1868 both companies were grading past each other in Utah, each hoping Congress would pay for its line. On April 9, 1869, Dodge and Huntington agreed to join at Promontory Summit. Congress confirmed it the next day. Charles Crocker then collected a bet. On April 27 a work train derailed after two miles. On April 28, 1869, Crocker’s gangs—Irish rail handlers and several thousand Chinese laborers—put down 10 miles and 56 feet between about 5 a.m. and 7 p.m. A locomotive ran the new track to prove it. The record still stands. The material list and the witnesses are the transcontinental page.
They met on May 10, 1869—not May 8; Weber Canyon washouts held Durant. Central Pacific 4-4-0 No. 60, Jupiter, Schenectady 1868, brought Stanford. Union Pacific sent No. 119. The gold spike, the champagne photograph, the telegraph word DONE, and the Chinese men who placed the last rail and were then moved aside are the transcontinental encyclopedia. Central Pacific had built about 690 miles from the Sacramento waterfront. The original Jupiter was later renumbered and scrapped in 1901. O’Connor Engineering built the replica in 1975; it reached the park in 1979.
Southern Pacific and what remains
May 10 did not put Central Pacific into San Francisco. A California subsidiary, the Western Pacific Railroad of 1862—not the later Gould road of the same name—finished the line from Sacramento to the Bay and put the company into Oakland. Through cars and a seven-day advertising schedule followed. The Big Four already had larger plans. They used the Southern Pacific, chartered in 1865, to take California. Central Pacific was leased to that company on April 1, 1885. The paper corporation lived on until it was dissolved on June 30, 1959.
Harriman’s Lucin Cutoff took the Overland Route off Promontory in 1904. Summit Tunnel was bypassed in 1997. Union Pacific still crosses Donner. The Governor Stanford and the C.P. Huntington are in Sacramento. The Jupiter replica steams at the park. Judah’s line is still a railroad. The name on the cab is Union Pacific’s.
Related reading on American-Rails.com
- Transcontinental Railroad · Union Pacific · Southern Pacific
- Donner Pass · Lucin Cutoff · California State Railroad Museum
- Collis P. Huntington · Charles Crocker · Leland Stanford · Mark Hopkins
- C.P. Huntington 4-2-4T · 4-4-0 Americans
- Railroad tycoons · Civil War railroads · Railroads in the 1860s · U.S. railroad history
Sources
- Pacific Railway Act, July 1, 1862, 12 Stat. 489. Amendatory act, July 2, 1864, 13 Stat. 356
- Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Judah, the Big Four, Cape Horn supply, Vanderbilt trip
- Solomon, Brian. Southern Pacific Railroad. St. Paul: Voyageur Press, 2007. Grading lag after the January 8, 1863 ceremony; Auburn; SP lease
- Welsh, Joe, and Kevin Holland. Union Pacific Railroad. Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2009. 1864 land-grant doubling
- Stover, John F. The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads. New York: Routledge, 1999. Land-grant totals 1850–1871
- Heath, Earl. “Track-Laying Extravaganza.” Trains, January 1943. Ten-mile day, April 28, 1869
- American-Rails.com, Transcontinental Railroad. Summit Tunnel dates and elevation; Chinese labor peak; April 9, 1869 meeting agreement; Promontory May 10; Jupiter replica 1979 at the park; Ogden as the operating junction
- American-Rails.com, Southern Pacific. April 1, 1885 lease; June 30, 1959 dissolution
- Stanford University, Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. Ten-mile-day material list
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