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Connecting the country was challenging. The first American railroad to carry passengers and freight was the Baltimore and Ohio, chartered in Maryland in 1827. At midcentury, the federal government began granting land to certain railroads in exchange for reduced carriage charges for government use. By 1853, one could ride by rail from New York to Chicago. One year later, Chicago was connected to the Mississippi River at Rock Island, Illinois. The west coast followed suit: in 1856, the Sacramento Valley Railroad (running between Sacramento and Folsom) was operational. But there were vast stretches of territory that could only be traversed by stagecoach, wagon, horseback or – worst of all – walking.
President Abraham Lincoln structured the railroad’s contract with both generosity and constraint. Railroad builders were given 6,400 acres of land for every mile of track laid, and $48,000 in government bonds for every mile completed. But there were strictures: the government withheld 20% of the bonds until the entire railroad was in working order, and would not release any money to either company until 40 miles of operative railroad was complete. And further, if the railroad between Missouri and Sacramento were not completed within 12 years, all the assets would be forfeited.
If Abraham Lincoln authorized the railroad, it was Theodore Judah who persuaded Congress. Judah was fascinated with railroads and had gone out to map the route, working on the western rails in 1854, to the displeasure of his wife it is rumored. When he’d completed the land survey in October of 1861, Judah set up an office at the end of the long corridor in the Capital Office Building in Washington, DC. As Congress members passed by, he’d lure them into his office to show close-ups of important areas of the route, including a certain point he’d recently found that might make the whole thing possible.
