Cosmopolitan Railway

{{short description|Proposed global railroad network}} {{Notability|date=March 2022}} thumb|Part of an illustration from Gilpin's treatise The '''Cosmopolitan Railway''' was a proposed global railroad network advocated by William Gilpin, formerly the first territorial governor of Colorado (1861–62), in his 1890 treatise ''Cosmopolitan Railway: Compacting and Fusing Together All the World's Continents''. Gilpin named his capital city of Denver as the "railroad centre of the West".{{sfn|Gilpin|1890|p=190}}

==Components== ''Cosmopolitan Railway'' was one of the earliest documents envisioning a land route to Alaska, a vision that would first be realized (though not in the form of a railroad) in 1942, with the completion of the crude original version of the Alaska Highway. The document also proposed a bridge to Asia across the Bering Strait, a concept that has been dubbed the Intercontinental Peace Bridge, which would have been, and still would be, an enormously important link between the Eurasia-Africa and the Americas.

However, the formidable expense and difficulty of building such a bridge, and of building thousands of miles of new railroad through remote portions of Siberia, far northern North America, Africa, and other areas, have kept the plan as nothing more than a vision.

==Footnotes== {{Reflist}}

== References == *{{Cite book | last = Gilpin | first = William | title = The Cosmopolitan Railway: compacting and fusing together all the world's continents | url = https://archive.org/stream/cosmopolitanrai02gilpgoog#page/n6/mode/2up | publisher = The History Company | location = San Francisco | year = 1890}}

Category:Exploratory engineering Category:International rail transport Category:Proposed rail infrastructure