![]() The two railroad lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, with locomotives meeting nose-to-nose to signify the joining of the tracks. The act touched off a race to the middle when both railroad companies were finally laying track in 1865. President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862, which gave two companies land grants and government bonds to build railways to the middle of the country from the fringes: the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento, California, on east and the Union Pacific Railroad from Council Bluffs, Iowa, towards the west. They worked together to determine an alternate route (his original idea would tunnel through multiple mountains, something the country hadn’t yet done), and he and his backers incorporated the Central Pacific Railroad Company. Luckily for Judah, he found support from a storekeeper, several investors, and even President Abraham Lincoln. He was so obsessed with it, in fact, that people started to call him "Crazy Judah." Civil engineer Theodore Judah devised a way to connect the train lines on the West Coast and the East Coast with one long route along the 41st parallel through Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. The country’s first transcontinental railroad began in the mid-1800s with a single man and his obsession.
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