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The Central Pacific Railroad was a rail route between California and Utah built eastwards from the West Coast in the 1860s, to complete the western part of the "First Transcontinental Railroad" in North America. It later became part of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

History[]

Construction of the road was financed primarily by 30-year, 6% U.S. government bonds authorized by Sec. 5 of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. They were issued at the rate of $16,000 ($265,000 in 2017 dollars) per mile of tracked grade completed east of the designated base of the Sierra Nevada range near Roseville, CA where California state geologist Josiah Whitney had determined were the geologic start of the Sierras' foothills.

Many 19th century national proposals to build a transcontinental railroad failed because of the energy consumed by political disputes over slavery.

In 1885, the Central Pacific was under the operation of the Southern Pacific Railway. San Francisco was the end of the line, and just after Sacramento was a stop at a town named Lathrop. But technically the CPRR remained a corporate entity until 1959, when it was formally merged into Southern Pacific. (It was reorganized in 1899 as the Central Pacific "Railway".) The original right-of-way is now controlled by the Union Pacific, which bought Southern Pacific in 1996.

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