Talk:Transcontinental railroad

message: SURELY....there is a date when the Canadian transcontinental railroad was finished and available for use...it stands now, as some time between 1881 and 1885--not good enough for an encyclopedia.  And how about a separate entry for the United States, instead of merely a photo caption giving us May 10, 1869?  HomeBuilding  207.178.98.59 (talk) 13:15, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I remember there was a British plan to build a trans-African railway, but little of it was actually built. Anyone know more? Warofdreams 16:17, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That was a plan of Cecil Rhodes to build a "Cape to Cairo" railroad which would have run from Johannesburg to Cairo.  Mr Rhodes was heavily involved in exploiting the natural resources of southern Africa and wanted a quicker and easier way to get his product to European markets rather than sailing around the continent.  I don't think much of the planned route got built outside of Zimbabwe (which was then called Rhodesia).  slambo 15:45, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Recently, an anon editor posting from IP address 86.10.51.14 began routinely removing the following passage:
:*John D. Spreckels completed his privately-funded San Diego and Arizona Railway in 1919, thereby creating a direct link (via connection with the Southern Pacific lines) between San Diego and the Eastern United States.
After this removal was reverted several times The Proffesor left a message on my talk page regarding these previous edits. In the interim, The Proffesor has entered into a cycle of reverts over this issue with several other editors; his last edit began with
:Some consider the San Diego and Arizona Railway transcontinental...
which was reverted (properly, in my opinion) by Mdhennessey on the basis of Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words. I have since left a response on The Proffesor's talk page citing several sources that support designating the SD&A as a transcontinental railroad. Just minutes ago I reverted this same edit by The Proffesor and am asking that further discussion take place here prior to any further edits regarding this issue.
The last thing I want to see is an edit war erupt over this; any input or guidance from "outside" editors will, I am sure, be appreciated by all involved. I'd even support protecting the page, if necessary.--Lord Kinbote 06:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've taken some time to consider the issue before commenting here (partly to see if anyone else spoke up first).  It seems to me that SD&A qualifies as a transcontinental as much as California Southern Railroad does.  Both railroads were built to form connections between a longer system and the Pacific coast at San Diego, but neither of the shorter railroads got past the California-Arizona border.  The other railroads on the US list here all directly connected points near or east of the Mississippi River to the Pacific and are more intuitively transcontinental; if nothing else, they all crossed the Rocky Mountains on their own rails.  So it comes down to a question of qualifications.  If we are going to include railroads that were built and intended to form parts of transcontinental connections, then we also need to include companies such as California Southern Railroad, Atlantic and Pacific Railroad and other subsidiary and separate companies.  I'm more inclined to limit the list to companies that connected the longer distances with their own rails.  However, I also think that mention should be made of these smaller companies that were intended to form parts of larger transcontinental systems; we just need to specify that these smaller railroads weren't by themselves transcontinental railroads.  Slambo (Speak) 13:04, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe it's widely agreed that the Western Pacific Railroad is transcontinental (), and it never crossed the Rockies. The problem is that we don't actually have a definition. The closest I can find to a good definition is "a railroad that crosses a continent or connects existing railroads so as to make a rail system that spans a continent", but that's too ambiguous, since it includes lines such as the International Railway of Maine and the Union Pacific Missouri River Bridge. --NE2 09:22, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: San Diego and Arizona Railway (SD&A)

message: How is it possible that the Panama Railroad is listed as the first transcontinental railroad, but the article First Transcontinental Railroad describes the whole history of the U.S. Railroad?
I suggest that the U.S. Railroad should be moved to an article entitled Second Transcontinental Railroad and that the First transcontinental railroad article redirects to the history of the Panama Railroad.
--WikiDrive 02:12, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This was discussed over a year ago and closed with no consensus for a move.  The comments are in the archive. Slambo (Speak) 14:36, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

text: *The seminal period book on the subject of the Panama Railroad is "Illustrated History of the Panama Railroad" by Fessenden N. Otis, MD published by Harper & Brothers in 1861. (The author had been a ship's surgeon for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company from 1853-59.) At no place in this work is the railroad described as being a "transcontinental" line. (The word "continent" only appears once in the 268 page book (on page 262) referring to the location of ticket offices in Europe, while the word "transcontinental" does not appear in the book anywhere at all.) On the first page of the book's main text (page 15), however, Dr. Otis describes the purpose for which the road was built across the Isthmus of Panama was to permit ...free interoceanic communication at this point." The line was also described in the contemporary press when it opened in 1855 as being an "inter-oceanic" railroad such as in a story entitled "A Great Enterprise" published in The Portland (Maine) Transcript on February 17, 1855 ("That great enterprise, the inter-oceanic or Panama Railroad across the Isthmus, is completed, and the rough Atlantic is now wedded, with an iron band, to the fair Pacific.") as opposed to a "transcontinental" one. Centpacrr (talk) 11:00, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Two "First Transcontinental Railroads"

message: The Panama Railroad as used in "transcontinental" travel between New York and San Francisco before 1869 was actually only a very small portion (between Aspinwall and Panama City) of the entire ticketed passage which was offered by the North American Steamship Company prior to the completion of the Pacific Railroad with the vast majority of the trip being made over water by steamer. I see that the contention that the Panama Railroad is a "transcontinental" railroad is derived from an entry to that effect originally made by Infrogmation on February 2, 2004, in the article Transcontinental Railroad and on December 27, 2004, by RJII (since permanently banned from editing for abuse), but neither of these contentions (or the current portion of the article still claiming that the Panama Railroad is a "transcontinental railroad") cite any references to support it. When opened on January 28, 1855, the railroad was actually referred to as the "Inter-Oceanic" railroad. Using this logic, a railroad running from Miami, FL, on the Atlantic Ocean to Tampa, FL, on the Gulf of Mexico could also be described as a "transcontinental railroad" as well which would, I think, be misleading. (Centpacrr (talk) 21:44, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It was "transcontinental" in that it connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. I started the article  on the Panama Railroad to fill a gap since noone else had started the article before me, but cannot claim to be the first to notice that it connected the two sides of a continent. I know of no suggestion that any other railway did so earlier. -- Infrogmation (talk) 22:41, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Panama Railroad as a "Transcontinental" Railroad

message: Obviously the concept of North American transcontinental railways is a notable one. But elsewhere it doesn't seem to be as important, coming about more through joining of mature systems. I suggest moving the North American stuff to transcontinental railroads in North America (unless we decide not to include Mexico), and turning this into a disambiguation with links to pages such as Trans-Australian Railway, Trans-Asian Railway, and Cape-Cairo Railway. --NE2 13:29, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Split this page?

message: I believe it took a Act of Congress to "drive the silver spike".  Since both railroads were being paid for the amount (miles) of track laid, and, since both railroads had laid track that passed each other, and, since neither railroad wouls stop laying track, then Congress acted to stop the payments for the laying of track.  Congress then directed the two railroads to relay their tracks to meet in Utah.  Many Irish and Chinese laborers were then put of work.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.11.21.203 (talk) 02:55, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: An Act of Congress

message: Important bridges such as the Red Sea bridge link different continents or major sub-continents and should be at least mentions in this topic.    Tabletop (talk) 22:40, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: You don't understand what transcontinental means. --NE2 07:07, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Intercontinental Bridges

message: In line with the other sub headings in the article, the Australia section should be renamed to reflect the continent it exists in, even if it is the only country mentioned in the section. Which name for the continent should be used though?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by OffiMcSpin (talk • contribs) 15:39, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Nobodys made a comment so I'm going to go for Oceania--OffiMcSpin (talk) 00:55, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Australasia or Oceania for Australia

message: At the risk of offending, I'll enter an opinion/observation.
This article seems to me a case of trying to create invent an article out of a disambiguation. The page seems to be trying to summarize numerous topics related only by the fact that according to certain definitions they could be considered to cross a continent. But there is little discussion of what a "transcontinental railway" is or why that by itself is notable. By the same token I could turn the disambig Springfield into an article about all the towns with that name and describe each one. That would be a bogus article. The fact that the individual towns themselves are notable does not make "Springfield" a notable topic itself. By the same token I don't really know of anything particularly notable about the concept of a transcontinental railroad.
I would propose that this should be made into a disambig.
--Mcorazao (talk) 16:42, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree; see #Split this page? above. --NE2 17:54, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Observation

message: Despite the opening line of this article I'm wondering if technically trans-european services ARE actually worthy of inclusion here? Though clearly not as impressive in many ways due to its paltry size in comparison with Asia or America, certainly it is now possible to cross large sections of our small continent by direct train (for example London-Marseilles, Paris-Brindisi, Helsinki-Moscow, Madrid-Paris etc...you can even buy a ticket for a London-Malta service by train (and ferry of course!). Plus there are plenty of former services as the opening line suggests like the Orient Express Paris-Istanbul serivce which could really should be listed here as a trans-continental service. What do people think about altering the first line and startin a new paragraph on cross-Europe services??--Mapmark (talk) 13:25, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Europe

message: The long standing link to the 1864 Executive Order of the President fixing the point of commencement of the Pacific Railroad has been restored. This original link (which had been in place since August 18, 2008) provides direct access to a searchable, verbatim transcription made directly from an original 1864 U.S. Government produced printing of Senate Ex. Doc. No. 27 (38th Congress, 1st Session). The link which had been recently substituted for it is not to a verifiable original document, but to a 778-page pdf of a 1907 commercially published volume (The Century Co., New York) containing unsourced, unverified third party transcriptions of many hundreds of Lincoln's "speeches, letters, state papers, and miscellaneous writings" made and printed 43 years after the fact which a reader then has to then search through on his/her own in order to find the the the text of the unsourced 1907 commercial transcription.  Further substitution of the unverified, unsourced 1907 transcription for the link to the page with the annotated transcription made from the 1864 original will be considered to be disruptive editing and treated as such.  Centpacrr (talk) 16:09, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: 1864 Executive Order of the President fixing the point of commencement of the Pacific Railroad (Original Document)

message: Would a US48 Canada Alaska Railroad count as a Transcontinental railway?  http://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature86149/?WT.mc_id=WN_Feat     Tabletop (talk) 03:15, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: US48-Canada-Alaska RR

message: The arrangement of the railroads in the Section "The Americas" did not follow either geographical or chronological order, so I rearranged it chronologically. --WikiDrive (talk) 16:27, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Sections now arranged by continents/sub continents. Centpacrr (talk) 00:38, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Rearranged the section "The Americas"

message: Multiple clauses in this sentence make for difficult reading:
:Construction by the Central Pacific Railroad and Union Pacific Railroad of the 1,928 mile "Pacific Railroad" link between Council Bluff,IA/Omaha, NE and the San Francisco Bay at Oakland, CA via Ogden, UT and Sacramento, CA connecting with the existing railroad network to the East Coast via ferry creating the world's first transcontinental railroad when it opened in 1869 was made possible by the Congress through the passage of Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862, 1864 and 1867.
I'm going to try to shorten it by trimming out details (which are/should be covered in the body text, anyway). If anyone objects, feel free to edit/revert and discuss here. Phlar (talk) 20:44, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Long sentence in lede