Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater looks to be beautiful, with sunny skies and a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:06 PM. The moon is in a waxing gibbous phase with eighty-two percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The results of Friday’s FW poll, Friday Poll — Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford: Optimist or Reprobate? are now in: 78.57% of respondents doubted Ford’s supposed break with a troubled past.
Perhaps you’ve never seen a rabbit eating raspberries. You’re one click away from changing that:
On this day in 1869, America goes truly transcontinental:
The First Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the “Pacific Railroad” and later as the “Overland Route“) was a 1,907-mile (3,069 km) contiguous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 across the western United States to connect the Pacific coast at San Francisco Bay with the existing Eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa, on theMissouri River. The rail line was built by three private companies: the original Western Pacific Railroad Company between Oakland and Sacramento, California (132 miles (212 km)), theCentral Pacific Railroad Company of California eastward from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory (U.T.) (690 miles), and the Union Pacific Railroad Company westward to Promontory Summit from the road’s statutory Eastern terminus at Council Bluffs on the eastern shore of the Missouri River opposite Omaha, Nebraska (1,085 miles).[1][2][3]
Opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869, with the driving of the “Last Spike” with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit,[4] the road established a mechanized transcontinental transportation network that revolutionized the settlement and economy of the American West by bringing these western states and territories firmly and profitably into the “Union” and making goods and transportation much quicker, cheaper and much more flexible from coast to coast.