The sectional problem, which had reached its full development in Congress by 1857, prevented any action in the interest of a Pacific railway so long as it should remain unchanged. As the bickerings widened into war, the railway still remained a practical impossibility. But after war had removed from Congress the representatives of the southern states the way was cleared for action. When Congress met in its war session of July, 1861, all agitation in favor of southern routes was silenced by disunion. It remained only to choose among the routes lying north of the thirty-fifth parallel, and to authorize the construction along one of them of the railway which all admitted to be possible of construction, and to which military need in preservation of the union had now added an imperative quality. The summer session of 1861 revived the bills for a Pacific railway, and handed them over to the regular session of 1861-1862 as unfinished business. In the lobby at this later session was Theodore D. Judah, a young graduate of the Troy Polytechnic, who gave powerful aid to the final settlement of route and means. Judah had come east in the autumn in company with one of the newly elected California representatives. During the long sea voyage he had drilled into his companion, who happily was later appointed to the Pacific Railroad Committee, all of the elaborate knowledge of the railway problem which he had acquired in his advocacy of the railway on the Pacific Coast. California had begun the construction of local railways several years before the war broke out; a Pacific railway was her constant need and prayer. Her own corporations were planned with reference to the time when tracks from the East should cross her border and find her local creations waiting for connections with them. When the advent of war promised an early maturity for the scheme, a few Californians organized the most significant of the California railways, the Central Pacific. On June 28, 1861, this company was incorporated, having for its leading spirits Judah, its chief engineer, and Collis Potter Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford, soon to be governor of the state. Its founders were all men of moderate means, but they had the best of that foresight and initiative in which the frontier was rich. Diligently through the summer of 1861 Judah prospected for routes across the mountains into Utah territory, where the new silver fields around Carson indicated the probable course of a route. With his plans and profiles, he hurried on to Washington in the fall to aid in the quick settlement of the long-debated question.