Theodore Dehone Judah (March 4, 1826 – November 2, 1863) was an American civil engineer who was a central figure in the original promotion, establishment, and design of the First transcontinental railroad. He found investors for what became the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR). As chief engineer, he performed much of the route survey work to determine the best alignment for the railroad over the Sierra Nevada, which was completed six years after his death. Early life and education Theodore Judah was born in 1826 (perhaps 1825) in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Mary (Reece) and The Rev. Henry Raymond Judah, an Episcopal clergyman. After his family moved to Troy, New York, Judah attended the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then called the Rensselaer Institute in 1837 for a term and developed at a young age a passion for engineering and railroads. At age 23, Judah married Anna Pierce (1828-1895) on May 10, 1849. Theirs was the first wedding in the then-new St James Episcopal Church of Greenfield, Massachusetts. Career After studying briefly at Rensselaer, Judah went to work on a number of railroads in the Northeast, including engineering for the Lewiston Railroad down the Niagara Gorge. He was elected member of the American Society of Civil Engineers on May 1853; at that time there were fewer than 800 civil engineers in the United States. Judah was hired in 1854 at age 28, by Colonel Charles Lincoln Wilson, as the Chief Engineer for the Sacramento Valley Railroad in California. He and his wife Anna sailed to Nicaragua, crossed over to the Pacific, and caught a steamer to San Francisco. Under his charge, Sacramento Valley became in February 1856 the first common carrier railroad built west of the Mississippi River. Later, he was chief engineer of the California Central Railroad, incorporated 1857, and the San Francisco and Sacramento Railroad organized in 1856. Pacific railroad surveys On January 1857 in Washington DC, Judah published "A practical plan for building The Pacific Railroad", in which he outlined the general plan and argued for the need to do a detailed survey of a specific selected route for the railroad, not a general reconnaissance of several possible routes that had been done earlier. Nominated in the 1859 California Pacific Railroad Convention in San Francisco, Judah was sent to Washington DC to lobby in general for the Pacific Railroad. Congress was distracted by the trouble of pre-Civil War America