Cosmopolitan Railway

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The Cosmopolitan Railway was a global railroad network proposed in 1890 by William Gilpin, first territorial governor of Colorado, in his treatise Cosmopolitan Railway: Compacting and Fusing Together All the World's Continents.

Gilpin proposed the network would break down barriers and bring the world's civilizations into harmony. The idea admittedly had side benefits for Gilpin, who named his capital city of Denver as the world's administrative center.

[edit] Components

The Cosmopolitan Railway was one of the first documents envisioning a land route to Alaska, a corridor would later become the Alaska Highway. It also proposed a bridge to Asia via the Bering Strait, a vision that has been dubbed the Intercontinental Peace Bridge, and would be a pivotal link from Europe, Asia, and Africa to the Americas. However the formidable engineering problems with such a connection, plus the problems of building thousands of miles of railway through remote regions of Siberia, Africa, and the Canadian Arctic, kept the plan as nothing more than a vision.

Some aspects of Gilpin's Cosmopolitan Railway were realized seventy years later when a global network of air travel routes were established, overturning the longtime dominance held by ships and railways in international travel.