page_title: Columbus, Nebraska
section_title: Railroads and growth
hierarchical_section_title: Columbus, Nebraska / History / Railroads and growth
caption_attribution_description: Union Pacific depot in Columbus, Nebraska; seen from the southeast. (The building's long axis is parallel to the railroad tracks, which run northeast-southwest.) Built in 1910 in Richardsonian Romanesque style, the depot is a contributing property to the Columbus Commercial Historic District, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
context_page_description: Columbus is a city in and the county seat of Platte County, in the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. The population was 22,111 at the 2010 census.
context_section_description: Growth of the town was slow until 1863.  In that year, construction began in Omaha on the transcontinental railroad. The Homestead Act, passed the previous year, attracted a host of settlers to the Plains and gave rise to increased emigrant traffic business. The ferry across the Loup was replaced by a seasonal pontoon bridge, used in the summer and taken up in the winter.  
  The railroad reached Columbus in June 1866, when the city's population was about 75.
  The energetic and eccentric promoter George Francis Train envisioned building "a magnificent highway of cities" from coast to coast along the Union Pacific route; Columbus was to be one of these.  
  In 1865, he bought several hundred lots in the city. In the following year, seeing the nearby townsite of Cleveland as a threat to his plans for Columbus, he bought the only building on the site, a hotel, and moved it to Columbus.  He renamed the building the Credit Foncier Hotel, after his land company, Credit Foncier of America; 
  in it, he set aside a room permanently reserved for the President of the United States.  
  Train believed that the capital of the United States should be in the geographic center of the nation, 
  and promoted Columbus as "...the new center of the Union and quite probably the future capital of the U.S.A."
  Columbus grew and prospered during the 1870s, as a result of both expanding agriculture in Platte County and traffic on the railroad. During the decade, the population of the county grew threefold, and Columbus became the trade center for an eight-county area. The Black Hills Gold Rush in 1875 led the city's merchants to promote it as a staging and outfitting area for gold seekers, who could ride the railroad to Columbus and then travel overland to the gold fields.
  In 1879, Columbus became the focus of a war between railroad companies. The Burlington and Missouri proposed to develop a line from Lincoln through Columbus and into northwestern Nebraska, and urged the citizens of Platte County to vote a bond of $100,000 for construction expenses. Union Pacific financier Jay Gould, displeased at the prospect of competition, informed the voters of the county that if the measure passed, he would do his best to ruin Columbus. After a heated campaign, the measure passed despite Gould's threats. The Burlington and Missouri built a line from Lincoln to Columbus, but stopped there; for their diagonal route across Nebraska, they chose one that crossed the Union Pacific at Grand Island rather than Columbus.
  Gould sought to make good on his threat. When the Union Pacific developed its subsidiary Omaha, Niobrara and Black Hills Railroad, he directed that it cross the Loup River at Lost Creek, then run south to join the Union Pacific's main line at Jackson (since renamed Duncan), bypassing Columbus.  Fortunately for Columbus, an ice jam destroyed the Lost Creek bridge in the spring of 1881.  Railroad officials agreed to reroute the line down the north bank of the Loup to Columbus in exchange for a $25,000 contribution from the city.
caption: Union Pacific depot in Columbus
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