UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD COMPANY

company that extended the American railway system to the Pacific Coast; it was incorporated by an act of the U.S. Congress on July 1, 1862. The original road was built westward 1,006 miles (1,620 km) from Omaha, Neb., to meet the Central Pacific, which was being built eastward from Sacramento, Calif. The two railroads were joined at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. The Union Pacific was largely financed by federal loans and land grants, but it overextended itself through its involvement in the Crdit Mobilier scandal, in which a few manipulators reaped enormous profits. After exposure of the scheme, which left the railroad badly in debt, the company went into receivership in 1893. It was reorganized in 1897 under the leadership of Edward H. Harriman, who was responsible for major improvements and standardization and who led the railroad to participate in the economic development of the West. Harriman used the railroad as a holding company for the securities of other transportation companies in his empire. The Union Pacific grew to operate in 13 western states, extending from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Kansas City, Mo., to Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles. Since 1969 it has been owned by the Union Pacific Corporation, a holding company. In 1982 the Union Pacific merged with two other railroads, the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company (q.v.) and the Western Pacific Railroad Company (headquartered in San Francisco), to form what came to be called the Union Pacific System. Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific retained their separate corporate identities to some degree (under the holding company Union Pacific Corporation), but Western Pacific became a subsidiary of Union Pacific. Trafficking and marketing of all three railroads were fully unified. Its acquisition of the Southern Pacific Rail Corporation in 1996 made Union Pacific the largest railroad in the United States, with control of almost all of the rail-based shipping in the western two-thirds of the country. The Union Pacific Corporation is headquartered in Bethlehem, Pa.