Lloyd Tevis, one of the great landholders of California, estimated that the Southern Pacific doubled the value of surrounding lands.
Henry George, Our Land And Land Policy, in The Complete Works of Henry George (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1904, original edition 1871) 8: 24.
Tevis to Huntington, Jan. 29, 1878, CPH Papers, ser. 1, r. 14.
The most detailed account of the railroad grants comes from Public Aids to Transportation Table 13. Table 13 actually is two tables, with one table reflecting adjusted grants (that is with forfeited grants subtracted) for some railroads and another table reflecting unadjusted grants, where the amount lost by forfeiture or errors was not clear. Among the roads with adjusted grants, the Union Pacific received 11.4 million acres; the main line of the Central Pacific received 7.88 million acres, and the Kansas Pacific got 7.09 million acres. For those roads with unadjusted grants, the Northern Pacific got 39.4 million acres over its entire system.
The western roads received the following amounts from the states: Nebraska, 498,742; Texas 32,990,000; Oregon, 3,200; Minnesota, 2,875,856.
"Report of the Auditor of Railroad Accounts," House Ex. Doc. 1, 46th Congress, 2nd Session, 1911, Table 13, 113-15.
Eventually around 35 million acres were returned, and in addition the railroads relinquished an additional 8 million acres in 1940 in exchange for the government canceling preferential reduced rates it was entitled to receive. This created interesting geographies of land whose title was in limbo for years as railroad claims and ownership were sorted out.
Public Aids to Transportation, 2:29, 111.
H. Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854-1871 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), 47-48.
Paul Wallace Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854-90 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1954), 137-39.