Northern Pacific Railway

The Northern Pacific Railway was a transcontinental railroad in the United States, chartered by Congress in 1864 to build a line connecting the Great Lakes to Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. It received federal land grants of nearly 40 million acres to finance construction, completed in 1883 when its main line was joined near Gold Creek, Montana, and it carried wheat, timber, minerals, cattle and passengers across roughly 6,800 miles of track through Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. In 1970 it merged with the Great Northern Railway, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad and the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway to form the Burlington Northern Railroad, later part of BNSF Railway.