Episode 2 of 3
Signing of the Pacific Railroad Act
- When
- July 1, 1862
- Where
- Executive Mansion
Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act on July 1, 1862, authorizing land grants and bonds for the transcontinental railroad construction.
The act authorized extensive land grants in the Western United States and 30-year government bonds at 6 percent for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad companies. It aimed to construct a continuous railroad from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Sacramento, California.
Sources
- Pacific Railroad Acts Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-19
- First transcontinental railroad Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-03
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.