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Transcontinental Railroad: Maps, Facts, Completion

Last revised: September 2, 2026

By: Adam Burns

The first transcontinental railroad was not one company. It was a federal statute, two construction armies, and about 1,776 to 1,779 miles of new track between Sacramento, California, and Omaha, Nebraska, laid in six years almost entirely by hand. The Central Pacific came east from the Sacramento waterfront. The Union Pacific went west from the Missouri. They met at Promontory Summit on Monday, May 10, 1869.

Mike Del Vecchio was right, in Railroads Across America, that no other single event in American railroading quite matches it. Cross-country travel fell from months by wagon or clipper to about a week. That is the legend, and the legend is mostly true. What the ceremony did not do is put a through rail from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Missouri River still had no bridge at Omaha. The Central Pacific still had to reach tidewater on San Francisco Bay. The men who actually moved the last rail that morning were Chinese, and Andrew J. Russell’s famous handshake photograph does not show them.

Andrew J. Russell, “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying of Last Rail,” Promontory Summit, May 10, 1869. Central Pacific chief engineer Samuel S. Montague (left) and Union Pacific chief engineer Grenville M. Dodge shake over the last rail, with Jupiter and No. 119 nearly coupler to coupler. The champagne bottles on the pilots are why railroad people still call this the champagne photo. Library of Congress / American-Rails.com collection.

On this page: At a glance · Pacific surveys · The 1862 and 1864 acts · Central Pacific · Sierra tunnels · Union Pacific · Map · The Utah race · Ten miles in one day · May 10, 1869 · After the spike · Lucin Cutoff · The park today

At a glance

Mileage from the June 1870 Travelers’ Official Guide (Vernon), later UP/CP chainages, and the National Park Service. Bond and land figures from the acts of 1862 and 1864 (12 Stat. 489; 13 Stat. 356) and the Pacific Railway Commission. Information compiled September 2, 2026.

A railroad before there was a Union to finish it

Asa Whitney was already lecturing Congress on a Pacific railroad in 1845. The idea was older than the Republican Party and older than the war. What it lacked was a route everyone could live with. In March 1853 Congress directed the Army to survey corridors to the Pacific. Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of War, ran the work. Field parties under Isaac I. Stevens, John W. Gunnison, Amiel Weeks Whipple, John Pope, and others walked the 47th–49th, 41st–42nd, 38th–39th, 35th, and 32nd parallels. The published Pacific Railroad Surveys filled a dozen volumes. They were not eight separate roads. They were five principal belts, north to south, and a political argument wearing surveyors’ boots.

Southern men, Davis included, wanted the 32nd-parallel line—along the Gila, through Texas, to San Diego or thereabouts. Northern men wanted a Platte Valley road from the Missouri. Slavery made a choice impossible. The files sat until the South left the room. Abraham Lincoln was elected November 6, 1860. South Carolina seceded December 20. Fort Sumter was fired on April 12, 1861. With Southern senators gone, the central route was no longer a compromise. It was the remaining option.

Lincoln believed in railroads. That is not folklore. He had failed at a seat in the Illinois legislature at twenty-three and spent the next decades as a lawyer who understood what iron did to a prairie county. He defended the Illinois Central in tax cases. In 1857 he represented the Mississippi & Missouri (later folded into the Rock Island) in the Effie Afton case after a steamboat struck the first bridge across the Mississippi at Rock Island. The river interest wanted the bridge down. Lincoln argued that a railroad had as much right to cross a navigable river as a boat had to use it. The country would live with that answer.

He did not, however, build the Pacific Railroad as a campaign against the Confederacy. The war made a central route politically possible. California gold, a military road, and a mail contract were the Union arguments. Binding the Pacific slope to the remaining United States was the point. The railroad would outlast the war by a century. That was the better reason.

“Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way.” Currier & Ives lithograph of the newly finished Pacific Railroad, 1869. The title is borrowed from Bishop Berkeley; the train is the argument. Author’s collection.

The acts, the land, and the paper

Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act on July 1, 1862. It created the Union Pacific Railroad Company as a federal corporation and authorized the already-chartered Central Pacific to build east from the navigable waters of the Sacramento. The road and a telegraph were to run from the Missouri to the Pacific. The President would fix the Iowa end. Right-of-way was 200 feet on each side of the track. Land came in a checkerboard: every alternate odd-numbered section, five per mile on each side, within ten miles of the line. Government bonds, $1,000 each, thirty years at 6 percent, were to be issued at $16,000 a mile on the plains, doubled between the ranges, and trebled for 150 designated mountain miles at each end. Those bonds were a loan, not a gift. They were also, in 1862, a first mortgage. Capitalists would not buy a second-class security behind Uncle Sam. Construction lagged.

The amending act of July 2, 1864 is the one that made the job financeable, and the one that made it notorious. Land was doubled to twenty alternate sections a mile, taken from a twenty-mile belt. More important, the companies were allowed to issue their own first-mortgage bonds up to the same amounts as the government issue. The United States dropped to a second lien. On a mountain mile a promoter could now point to $48,000 in government paper and $48,000 in company paper. That is the $96,000 figure that still wanders through popular accounts. It was a stack of securities, not a Treasury check.

John Stover, in The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads, put the whole land-grant era in scale: between 1850 and 1871 the government offered railroads on the order of 170 million acres for some eighty projects; about 131 million acres were actually used, building roughly 18,700 miles. The Illinois Central had already shown, in the 1850s, that alternate sections could finance a main line. The Pacific roads were the same idea at continental length. On paper, twenty sections a mile is 12,800 acres. Multiply by 1,779 miles and you can print 22.8 million acres. That arithmetic is not what the General Land Office patented. Mineral land was excepted. Settlers were already on some odd sections. Surveys ran years behind the track. The Pacific Railway Commission later counted more than 26 million acres across the whole bond-aided Pacific system, Union Pacific and Central Pacific plus the Kansas Pacific and the other aided branches.

The same commission tallied about $64.6 million in government bonds issued to those aided Pacific roads. That is not the cost of construction. Construction cost more, and on the Union Pacific side Crédit Mobilier made sure the billed cost was higher still. In the 1898–99 settlements the companies repaid the principal and a great deal of interest. The government got its money. It did not get it cheap, and it did not get it on time.

Central Pacific: Judah, the Big Four, and the Sierra

The western leg was Theodore D. Judah’s railroad before it was anyone else’s. Judah was a civil engineer, Rensselaer-trained, who had already built the Sacramento Valley Railroad, California’s first. He was convinced a railroad could be taken over the Sierra at Donner Pass on grades a locomotive could climb. In 1859 he went to Washington to say so. On January 14, 1860, he opened a “Pacific Railroad Museum” in the Capitol and buttonholed whoever would listen. Congress was slow. He went back to California, ran the line himself, and on November 1, 1860, wrote up a loose incorporation. San Francisco money would not touch it. Sacramento would.

Four merchants put up the cash California law required—$1,000 a mile, $115,000 to start. Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins kept a hardware store. Leland Stanford sold groceries and ran for office. Charles Crocker sold dry goods. They incorporated the Central Pacific Railroad of California on June 28, 1861. Stanford was elected governor that fall. Huntington went east and stayed there, buying iron, locomotives, and influence. Crocker took construction. Hopkins kept the books. They are the Big Four. Judah was the engineer who had made them possible, and they squeezed him out of the decisions.

The company accepted the 1862 act on October 7 and filed with the Interior Department on December 24. Ground was broken at Front and K Streets in Sacramento on January 8, 1863. 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. First rails went down October 26. The company’s first locomotive, the 4-4-0 Governor Stanford, an 1862 Norris product, made its first run over a few hundred feet on November 10. It is at the California State Railroad Museum today. Judah was not there to see it. He had sailed for New York in October to find backers who would buy the Big Four out. He caught yellow fever crossing Panama and died at the Metropolitan Hotel on November 2, 1863, age thirty-seven. The railroad he had located was built on his maps. He never rode it over the summit.

Everything the Central Pacific needed except timber and granite came 15,000 miles around Cape Horn, or across Panama, in ships Huntington kept on the water. Brian Solomon, in Southern Pacific Railroad, notes that real grading did not follow the ceremony for some ten months. On March 25, 1864, the Governor Stanford hauled granite and earned the company its first freight money. Service reached Auburn, at the foot of the Sierra, on May 13, 1865. From there the line followed the North Fork of the American River through Colfax, Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap toward Donner.

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. They were 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; some writers have said thousands. The company did not keep a proper count.

Fifteen tunnels and a summit at 7,042 feet

The Sierra is why Central Pacific’s 690 miles were the harder 690. Fifteen tunnels were driven through granite with black powder, hand steel, and, from 1867, nitroglycerin mixed on the work by a Scottish chemist named James Howden. Summit Tunnel (Tunnel 6), at Donner Pass, was 1,659 feet long and 124 feet deep in solid rock. Work began August 27, 1866. The heading holed through in August 1867. Rails were in on November 30. 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.

Once Summit Tunnel had rail, the pace changed. Central Pacific reached Reno on June 18, 1868, 154 miles from Sacramento. From there the Humboldt Desert was a different kind of hard—alkali, heat, and no timber—but it was not granite. The company that had spent years on a hundred mountain miles now had a reason to run.

Union Pacific: Durant, Dey, Dodge, and the plains

The 1862 act created Union Pacific. Commissioners met in Chicago that September. The company was slow to organize and slower to build. Thomas C. Durant, vice president and general manager, was the man who ran it. Peter A. Dey was chief engineer. Samuel B. Reed located and built. Oliver and Oakes Ames of Boston put up money when New York would not. Grenville M. Dodge, the Iowa engineer and Union general who had already walked the Platte, was the man Durant needed and could not yet have. Dodge was still in the Army.

Lincoln fixed the eastern terminus by executive order on November 17, 1863: on the western boundary of Iowa, in the township opposite Omaha. That is Council Bluffs. Durant broke ground anyway on the Nebraska bank. The ceremony was December 2, 1863—not December 1—on the bottoms north of Omaha. Territorial governor Alvin Saunders turned a shovel. There were bands, cannon, and fireworks. There was not yet a rail. Union Pacific laid none of consequence until July 1865. The war, the money, and the Missouri were all in the way.

Durant’s financing vehicle was Crédit Mobilier of America. George Francis Train helped him buy a Pennsylvania charter, the Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency, for $50,000 in March 1864 and rename it. Union Pacific awarded construction to paper intermediaries who assigned the work to Crédit Mobilier. Federal bonds and stock flowed through the construction company. The railroad’s cost on paper was whatever Crédit Mobilier billed. Whether the line paid was secondary. Oakes Ames spread Crédit Mobilier shares among congressmen to keep the subsidies coming. The scandal broke in 1872, during Grant’s reelection. Censure was handed down. Almost no one went to prison. Union Pacific was left with a property that had cost far more to “build” than the iron in the ground.

Dey would not play. By December 1864 he had graded about twenty-three miles west of Omaha. Durant ordered the line bent along Mud Creek to lengthen the mileage and fatten the contract. Dey resigned December 7. Dodge finally came on as chief engineer in the spring of 1866, with the war over and with authority Durant could not easily undercut. He brought Army habits and an army of Irish trackmen. The Casement brothers, Jack and Dan, ran the laying gangs. Reed stayed on construction. Colonel Silas Seymour, Durant’s consulting engineer, had a title and Durant’s ear. Dodge had the railroad.

The Platte was the alignment Dodge had wanted all along: Omaha up the river to North Platte, then Lodgepole Creek into what became Wyoming, around the Laramie Range, over the Medicine Bow, to the Green River and into Utah. It was not the easy railroad of popular memory. The plains were easy only by comparison with Donner. Water, ties, and food all moved with the end of track. Hell on Wheels—the portable town of tents, whiskey, and gambling—followed the Casements from North Platte to Julesburg to Cheyenne to Benton. Pawnee scouts worked with the railroad. West of central Nebraska the Cheyenne and Lakota did not. Surveyors and graders were hit often enough that federal troops had to ride the work. The Plum Creek wreck of August 1867, when Cheyenne derailed a freight in Nebraska, is the incident most often cited. It was not the only one.

Progress, once Dodge was in, was a timetable. By late July 1866 the railhead was at Grand Island, 153 miles out. By October 6 it was 247 miles west of Omaha. By September 21, 1868, Union Pacific was on the Green River, more than 750 miles from the Missouri. Graders sometimes ran 200 miles ahead of the iron. That is how you win a race measured in bonds and sections.

Map

Route of the first transcontinental railroad (not to scale): Union Pacific from Omaha to Promontory Summit, Central Pacific from Sacramento to Promontory. Union Pacific’s longer mileage is the Platte and the Wyoming basins. Central Pacific’s shorter mileage is the Sierra. American-Rails.com collection.

The Utah race

The 1862 act never named a meeting point. Central Pacific was to reach the eastern boundary of California. Union Pacific was to build west from the Missouri. After that it was whoever laid more miles. By late 1868 both companies were in Utah with graders well beyond their own railheads. Central Pacific surveyed as far east as Echo Canyon. Union Pacific surveyed as far west as Humboldt Wells, Nevada. Parallel grades still sit on the Promontory peninsula where the two outfits worked within shouting distance, each hoping Congress would pay for its line and not the other’s.

Brigham Young took grading contracts for both companies. Mormon crews cut and filled in Weber Canyon and around Ogden. Union Pacific reached Ogden on March 7, 1869, 1,028 miles from Omaha. Central Pacific was at Monument Point on April 17, more than 672 miles from Sacramento and about twenty miles west of the summit. The waste was obvious. On April 9, 1869, Dodge and Huntington met in Washington and agreed to join at Promontory Summit. Congress confirmed it by joint resolution the next day. As part of the settlement Central Pacific bought Union Pacific’s track from a point five miles west of Ogden to Promontory—about fifty miles—for roughly $2.6 million, and leased the remaining five miles into Ogden. Ogden, not the spike site, became the operating junction. President Grant’s administration had also stopped writing bonds for duplicate grade. The race was over on paper. The last weeks of track were not.

Ten miles in one day

Union Pacific had put down a long day’s track in Wyoming and talked about it. Charles Crocker waited until the remaining gap was too short for Durant to answer, then bet he could lay ten miles in a day. On April 27 a work train derailed after two miles and he called it off. On April 28, 1869, with Jack Casement, Sam Reed, and other Union Pacific men as witnesses, Crocker started at dawn. Eight Irish rail handlers and several thousand Chinese laborers put down 10 miles and 56 feet between about 5 a.m. and 7 p.m. The Stanford Chinese Railroad Workers Project has the material list: 25,800 ties, 3,520 rails, 55,080 spikes, 14,050 bolts, some 4.5 million pounds of iron and wood. They stopped for lunch at Camp Victory, later the station of Rozel. A locomotive ran the new track in forty minutes to prove it was not a stunt grade. The record still stands. Central Pacific’s railhead was then about four miles from the summit.

May 10, 1869

The ceremony was set for May 8. Durant’s special was held in Weber Canyon by washouts, and by workers who wanted to be paid before they would let the vice president’s car roll. The date slipped to Monday, May 10. Leland Stanford came on Central Pacific’s 4-4-0 No. 60, Jupiter, Schenectady class of 1868, engineer George Booth, fireman R.A. Murphy, conductor Eli Dennison. Union Pacific’s assigned engine had been damaged; No. 119, a Rogers 4-4-0 of November 1868 sitting at Ogden, was sent instead, engineer Sam Bradford, fireman Cyrus Sweet, conductor Benjamin Mallory. Neither locomotive had been built for a photograph. They were what was in steam.

Central Pacific 4-4-0 No. 60, Jupiter, at Promontory in May 1869. The tender lettering is CPRR. This is the engine that brought Stanford to the spike. American-Rails.com collection.

About a thousand people stood in the alkali: railroad officers, a Chinese contingent from Central Pacific, five companies of the 21st U.S. Infantry, reporters, and anyone who could walk or ride in from Corinne. Stanford and Durant were there. So were Strobridge, Dodge, John Duff, Sidney Dillon of Crédit Mobilier, Reed, Herbert M. Hoxie, the Casements, and Seymour. David Hewes of San Francisco had commissioned the gold spike that gave the day its name—about six inches long, 17.6-karat gold, now at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Nevada sent silver. Arizona sent a spike of iron, silver, and gold. A laurel tie and a silver-headed maul were part of the stage set. The ceremonial spikes were tapped and pulled. A regular iron spike did the work. Stanford swung and missed. The telegraph wire lashed to the maul still carried the blows. W.N. Shilling sent the word DONE east and west. It was just after noon, local.

Eight Chinese men had placed the last rail. They were then moved aside. Russell’s champagne photograph, the image everyone knows, shows Montague and Dodge shaking hands between Jupiter and 119, with a crowd of white workers and officers on the locomotives. The men who had taken Central Pacific through the Sierra are not in the frame. That omission is now part of the history, not a footnote to it.

The original Jupiter was later renumbered and scrapped in 1901. No. 119 was scrapped about 1903. Ordinary engines, ordinary ends. Chadwell O’Connor’s O’Connor Engineering Laboratories in Costa Mesa, California, built the replicas from an 1870 design handbook and scaled 1869 photographs. They reached Promontory in 1979 and still steam at the park.

Union Pacific 4-4-0 No. 119 replica at Promontory Summit, circa 1982. O’Connor Engineering completed the pair for the National Park Service; they arrived in 1979. The original 119 was a Rogers locomotive of 1868. American-Rails.com collection.

What the spike did not finish

May 10 joined two construction railroads in the Utah desert. It did not open a continuous iron from New York to San Francisco. Lincoln’s eastern terminus was still on the Iowa bank, and there was no bridge. Passengers and cars crossed the Missouri by ferry, or on rails laid over ice in winter. The Union Pacific Transfer Company ran that business from 1866. The first Omaha–Council Bluffs railroad bridge, eleven spans of 250 feet on iron piers, opened March 27, 1872. Until then the Pacific Railroad began, for practical purposes, at Omaha. The Supreme Court later confirmed Milepost 0 at Council Bluffs. Both towns lived off the argument.

At the other end, the 1862 act had allowed a Western Pacific Railroad of California—not the twentieth-century Gould road of the same name—to finish the line from Sacramento to San Francisco Bay. That subsidiary put Central Pacific into Oakland. Through cars and a seven-day advertising schedule followed. The country that had taken a season to cross could now be crossed in a week, more or less, if the Missouri was behaving and the Sierra sheds were standing.

Dodge had looked at a causeway across the Great Salt Lake as Union Pacific came into Ogden and decided the water was too high and the money too short. The line went around the north end, over Promontory, because that is where the race ended. The lake would be crossed later, by a different company with a different balance sheet.

The Lucin Cutoff and the death of Promontory

Edward H. Harriman took Southern Pacific, which had absorbed Central Pacific, and ordered the obvious improvement Dodge had passed on. The Ogden & Lucin Railroad was the paper company. Work on the Lucin Cutoff began in 1902 under SP chief engineer William Hood. A twelve-mile trestle crossed the lake; earthen approaches filled the rest. Last rail was in November 1903. Freight used the cutoff from March 8, 1904; passengers from September 18. The official opening was January 1, 1905. Forty-four miles and a mountain of curvature came out of the Overland Route. Promontory became a branch.

The Promontory Branch lingered for local livestock and as a storm detour. Southern Pacific got ICC permission to abandon Lucin–Corinne on June 11, 1942. The rails went to the war. On September 8, 1942, two modern steam locomotives faced each other at the summit and a spike was pulled, a deliberate reverse of 1869. A new earthen causeway replaced the 1904 trestle in 1959. Union Pacific still crosses the lake on that fill. Nothing scheduled has crossed Promontory Summit in eighty years.

Golden Spike National Historical Park

Congress authorized Golden Spike National Historic Site on July 30, 1965. The John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, March 12, 2019, redesignated it Golden Spike National Historical Park. The park holds the summit, the east and west grades, unfinished cuts, camp sites, and the sign where the ten-mile day ended. The Jupiter and 119 replicas steam for visitors. The landscape is still empty enough to make the 1869 photographs intelligible.

The Golden Spike plaque at Promontory Summit. The unit is Golden Spike National Historical Park; the National Park Service ran it as a Historic Site from 1965 until the 2019 redesignation. American-Rails.com collection.

The Hewes gold spike is at Stanford. Another ceremonial spike is at the California State Railroad Museum. The iron that actually held the last rail was ordinary. The railroad that actually held the country together was not. Later transcontinentals—Kansas Pacific, Santa Fe, Southern Pacific’s Sunset, Northern Pacific in 1883, Great Northern in 1893, the Milwaukee Road’s Pacific Extension in 1909—filled other parallels. This was the first. The Overland Route it created is still a Union Pacific main line, from the Missouri to the Sierra, except for the twelve miles of desert where two locomotives once touched pilots and a telegrapher sent a four-letter word to a waiting country.

Railroads and the Big Four

Union Pacific · Central Pacific · Southern Pacific · Collis P. Huntington · Charles Crocker · Leland Stanford · Mark Hopkins

Related Reading on American-Rails.com

• U.S. railroad history
• Civil War railroads
• Union Pacific
• Central Pacific
• Southern Pacific
• Collis P. Huntington
• Charles Crocker
• Leland Stanford
• Mark Hopkins
• Donner Pass
• Railroad tycoons
• California State Railroad Museum
• C.P. Huntington 4-2-4T
• 4-4-0 Americans

Sources

• Pacific Railway Act, July 1, 1862, 12 Stat. 489
• Pacific Railway Act amendatory, July 2, 1864, 13 Stat. 356
• Report of the Commission and of the Minority Commissioner of the United States Pacific Railway Commission (Washington, 1887)
• Edward Vernon, Travelers’ Official Guide of the Railways, June 1870 (Union Pacific, p. 215; Western Pacific and Central Pacific, p. 216)
• David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Viking, 1999)
• Maury Klein, Union Pacific: The Birth of a Railroad, 1862–1893 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1987)
• Wesley S. Griswold, A Work of Giants: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962)
• John Debo Galloway, The First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Simmons-Boardman, 1950)
• John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (New York: Routledge, 1999)
• Brian Solomon, Southern Pacific Railroad (St. Paul: Voyageur Press, 2007)
• Joe Welsh and Kevin Holland, Union Pacific Railroad (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2009)
• Mike Del Vecchio, Railroads Across America (Osceola: MBI, 1998)
• Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000)
• Stanford University, Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project
• National Park Service, Golden Spike National Historical Park (Russell’s champagne photograph, Jupiter and No. 119, Chinese labor)
• Charles R. Wood, The Northern Pacific, Main Street of the Northwest (Seattle: Superior, 1968), for the 1853 survey background

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    Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific diesel locomotives, 1,029 frames counted once. Switchers, cab units, road-switchers, two acquired slugs, five RDCs, and bi-power 10000. Serial and order are separate c…

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23. Rock Island Steam Roster: Post 1900

    Oct 19, 26 11:01 AM

    
    Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific steam locomotives built or rebuilt since 1900. Drury's class grid, 1,482 frames counted once, including 85 4-8-4s. Last revenue steam was July 1953.

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24. Rock Island Railroad: Map, Pictures, Logo, History

    Oct 19, 26 10:51 AM

    
    The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific ran from Chicago to the Twin Cities, Denver, Tucumcari, and the Gulf. First train October 10, 1852. Directed service ended March 23, 1980. Steam and diesel rosters…

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25. EMD "F7" Locomotives: Cab, Top Speed, Specs, Rosters

    Oct 19, 26 12:27 AM

    
    EMD F7 cab units and boosters, 1,500 horsepower, built February 1949 through December 1953. Gear ratios, specifications, and the production roster by owner, serial, and order.

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26. Harlem Transfer Company: An NYC Terminal System

    Oct 19, 26 12:01 AM

    
    Harlem Transfer Company, the Lackawanna's offline freight terminal on the Bronx side of the Harlem River at East 135th Street. Carfloats to Hoboken, boxcab No. 2, and GE 44-tonner 53.

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27. Belpre Industrial Parkersburg Railroad: Roster, History, Photos

    Oct 18, 26 11:44 PM

    
    Belpre Industrial Parkersburg Railroad, a Class III short line leasing about 46.9 miles of CSX track at Parkersburg since 2020. The Ohio River bridge, the Marietta Subdivision, and five GP38-3s.

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28. Chicago, Peoria & St. Louis Railroad: Map, Timetables, History

    Oct 18, 26 10:57 PM

    
    Chicago, Peoria & St. Louis Railroad, an Illinois line from Pekin and Peoria through Springfield to Madison. Chartered in 1853. Sold in parcels on November 20, 1924. The Pekin line is today the Illino…

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29. Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Diesel Roster (All-Time)

    Oct 18, 26 10:54 PM

    
    All-time diesel roster of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. 951 parent frames, 72 Colorado & Southern, and 36 Fort Worth & Denver, each counted once. Serials included.

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30. Burlington Railroad (CB&Q): Map, History, Rosters, Photos

    Oct 18, 26 10:49 PM

    
    The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Burlington Route, ran from Chicago to Denver, the Twin Cities, and the Gulf. Steam built since 1900 and the diesel fleets are companion rosters. Burlington Northe…

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31. Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Steam Roster (Post 1900)

    Oct 18, 26 10:33 PM

    
    Chicago, Burlington & Quincy steam locomotives built or rebuilt since 1900. 429 Prairies, 383 Mikados, the Hudsons, and the O-5 4-8-4s. Drury's class grid.

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32. Virginian Railway's 2-6-6-6 Locomotives (Class AG)

    Oct 18, 26 01:38 PM

    
    Virginian Railway class AG. Eight Lima 2-6-6-6s, Nos. 900-907, built in 1945 for the east end. Billed at 753,000 pounds. Scrapped in 1960.

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33. Pennsylvania (PRR) Steam Roster: Post 1906

    Oct 18, 26 01:05 PM

    
    ennsylvania steam after 1906—H8, H9, and H10 Consolidations, 574 L1s Mikados, 598 I1s Decapods, 425 K4s Pacifics, 301 M1 Mountains. Drury’s grid. Last steam November 30, 1957.

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34. Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Railroad: The "Roarin' Elgin"

    Oct 18, 26 10:54 AM

    
    The Chicago, Aurora & Elgin, the Roarin' Elgin, ran 600-volt third-rail trains from Chicago to Aurora, Batavia, and Elgin. Passenger service ended at noon on July 3, 1957. Freight ended June 11, 1959.

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35. Algoma Central Railway: Map, Logo, Rosters

    Oct 17, 26 10:49 PM

    
    Algoma Central Railway, Sault Ste. Marie to Hearst. Wisconsin Central on February 1, 1995. Fifty-nine steam locomotives and forty-two diesels.

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36. Akron, Canton and Youngstown Railroad: Map, History, Rosters

    Oct 17, 26 05:49 PM

    
    Akron, Canton and Youngstown Railroad, Mogadore to Delphos. The rails never reached Canton or Youngstown. Norfolk & Western control on October 16, 1964. Twenty-six diesels and the historical society's…

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37. Georgia Railroad: Map, History, Logo, Rosters

    Oct 17, 26 12:59 PM

    
    Georgia Railroad, the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company, Augusta to Atlanta, with the Athens branch and the Macon Road. Mark GA. The railroad properties were sold on November 4, 1982.

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38. West Point Route (Railroad): Map, History, Logo

    Oct 16, 26 11:26 PM

    
    The West Point Route was a trademarked name comprising the Atlanta & West Point and Western Railway of Alabama, which were controlled by the Georgia Railroad.

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39. Virginian Railway Diesel Roster (All-Time)

    Oct 16, 26 11:11 PM

    
    All-time diesel roster of the Virginian Railway. 40 Fairbanks-Morse H16-44s, 25 H24-66 Train Masters, and one GE 44-tonner. Serials included.

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40. Virginian Railway Steam Roster (Post 1900)

    Oct 16, 26 10:55 PM

    
    Virginian Railway steam locomotives built since 1900. Mikados, 2-8-8-2s, the Triplex, class AE 2-10-10-2s, and the 1945 2-6-6-6s.

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41. Virginian Railway: Map, Rosters, History, Electrification

    Oct 16, 26 10:51 PM

    
    Virginian Railway, Deepwater to Norfolk. Combined in 1907 and completed in 1909. Electrified from Roanoke to Elmore. Absorbed by the Norfolk & Western on December 1, 1959.

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42. Baldwin "Centipede" Locomotives: Specs, Roster, Photos

    Oct 16, 26 03:58 PM

    
    Baldwin DR-12-8-1500/2 Centipede—2-D+D-2, two 608SC engines, 3,000 hp. SAL 4500 from the 1943 test bed. 54 on the serial list, 52 sold. PRR BP60 then BH50. None preserved.

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43. Louisville & Nashville Class M-1 2-8-4s: The Big Emmas

    Oct 16, 26 03:52 PM

    
    Louisville & Nashville class M-1, 42 Big Emma 2-8-4s. Baldwin in 1942 and 1944, Lima in 1949. Coal trains from Neon to DeCoursey. No locomotive survives.

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44. Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia Railway: Map, History, Rosters

    Oct 16, 26 03:21 PM

    
    Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia Railway, Chattanooga to Gadsden. The May 1929 card is 91.7 miles. Southern stock control closed on a January 1, 1971 schedule. Five diesels and Prince's steam list.

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45. Railroad Museums In The USA (2026): State Guides & Collections

    Oct 16, 26 02:29 PM

    
    U.S. railroad museums—what they are vs tourist railroads, preservation history (R&LHS, NRHS, IRM, Steamtown), state guides, and destination collections. Confirm hours on each museum’s site.

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46. Wyoming Railroad Museums (2026): A Complete Guide

    Oct 16, 26 02:26 PM

    
    Wyoming railroad museums—the Cheyenne Depot, Burlington 5633 at Douglas, Big Boy 4004, and the Laramie depot. Confirm hours and which locomotive is on the property.

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47. West Virginia Railroad Museums (2026): A Complete Guide

    Oct 16, 26 12:52 PM

    
    West Virginia railroad museums—Cass Scenic’s geared steam, the Hinton C&O collection, and the Martinsburg B&O roundhouse. Confirm hours and which locomotive is assigned.

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48. Washington Railroad Museums (2026): A Complete Guide

    Oct 16, 26 12:46 PM

    
    Washington railroad museums—Snoqualmie, Elbe, Chehalis, Reardan, and the Northern Pacific depot at Toppenish. Confirm hours and which locomotive is assigned.

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49. Vermont Railroad Museums (2026): A Complete Guide

    Oct 16, 26 12:42 PM

    
    Vermont railroad museums—the Shelburne Museum’s 1890 station, Central Vermont No. 220, and the private car Grand Isle. Confirm hours on the site.

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50. Tennessee Central Railway: Map, Logo, Rosters, History

    Oct 16, 26 11:32 AM

    
    Tennessee Central Railway, Harriman to Hopkinsville. Reorganized January 26, 1922. Last day August 31, 1968. Thirty-one diesels and the railroad's steam roster.

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