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Transcontinental Railroad
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Why it Was Built
Before the railroad, crossing the country was like signing up for a survival challenge. A wagon train from the Missouri River to California took four to six months, assuming your oxen didn’t drop dead, your axle didn’t snap in the middle of nowhere, and you didn’t get walloped by cholera. Sailing around South America? Add another half a year of storms, scurvy, and seasickness. The “fast” route through Panama cut the trip to a month, but travelers risked tropical disease at every step.
The country was expanding, but its people were crawling. Gold in California, farmland in the Midwest, booming trade with Asia—all of it was bottled up by distance. For President Lincoln and Congress, a coast-to-coast railroad wasn’t just a cool project. It was the only way to turn a months-long slog into a predictable, week-long trip and make the United States feel like one country instead of two disconnected worlds.
The demand was clear: America needed a faster way to move people, goods, and ideas. But a project this massive wasn’t going to happen on dreams alone. Someone had to pay for it—and that someone turned out to be Uncle Sam.
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The Government’s Big Gamble
Cue Abraham Lincoln and Congress with the Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864. The deal was simple and huge: government loans plus massive land giveaways for every mile of track laid. By the end, Washington had floated about $64 million in low-interest loans—more than the entire federal budget in some pre–Civil War years—and handed over 131 million acres of public land. That’s an area bigger than California, all parceled out for railroads to sell to settlers, towns, and speculators.
It was the single biggest federal investment of the 19th century, a gamble that steel rails could do what speeches and politics couldn’t—bind the country together.
The Transcontinental Railroad was an ambitious mega project that would eventually connect Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco, California.
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Breaking Ground...Finally
The Central Pacific started in Sacramento in January 1863 and laid its first rails that October. Almost immediately they slammed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And because, granite isn’t impressed by your deadlines, crews would spend years boring 15 tunnels through the mountains, including the 1,659-foot Summit Tunnel at Donner Pass. To keep the line open, they also built 40 miles of snow sheds and dozens of bridges along the slopes.
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Builders: Sweat, Dynamite, and Discrimination
Union Pacific crews were packed with Irish, German, and Italian immigrants plus thousands of Civil War vets. The Central Pacific Railroad leaned on over 13,000 Chinese laborers who became the backbone of the mountain work. Together they laid 1,776 miles of track—1,086 by Union Pacific and 690 by Central Pacific. That's the equivalent of 20,354,000 bananas laid end to end.
On the plains, progress was fast and the misery was slow: blistering heat, knife-cold winds, prairie fires, and the constant risk of raids. Twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for $1–$2 a day.
In the mountains, boredom wasn’t a thing. Central Pacific crews blasted 15 tunnels through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, including the Summit Tunnel at Donner Pass—1,659 feet of solid granite that took fifteen months to finish.
Snow buried camps forty feet deep; avalanches erased entire shifts. To keep trains moving, they built 40 miles of wooden snow sheds along the cliffs. Pay was about $30 a month for Chinese workers, but unlike white crews they paid for their own food and lodging—less money, more risk, and the worst jobs: dangling in baskets with dynamite, setting charges on sheer rock.
The dangers were a daily menu: misfired blasts, collapsing trestles, runaway carts, disease ripping through camp. On April 28, 1869, Central Pacific crews set a record that still raises eyebrows—ten miles of track in a single day. The bosses called it legendary. The workers called it exhaustion.
Chinese workers were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad company.
Building in the mountains involved the construction of massive trestle bridges to span mountain gorges and blasting out tunnels for trains to go through the mountain.
Irish, German, and Italian immigrants were primarily hired by the Union Pacific Railroad company.
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Colliding With Native Nations
The railroad wasn’t cutting across empty land. It was plowing through the homelands of Native nations who had lived there for centuries. The Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Shoshone watched as surveyors staked claims and track gangs followed with iron and dynamite. To them, this wasn’t “progress.” It was invasion.
So they fought back. Warriors raided construction crews, tore up tracks, and attacked supply trains. For the Union Pacific, this meant building a railroad while also fighting a war. The U.S. Army was sent in to “protect” the project, which usually translated into bloody clashes and burned villages. In some places, laying a few miles of track came at the cost of dozens of lives.
Then came the buffalo slaughter. The railroad opened the Plains to commercial hunters who killed bison by the thousands for hides and sport. Passengers even shot at herds from train windows like it was a carnival game. Before the railroad, tens of millions of buffalo thundered across the Plains. By the 1880s, only a few hundred were left. Since the buffalo were the heart of Native food, clothing, and culture, the loss wasn’t just ecological—it was cultural collapse.
Treaties that had promised Native peoples their lands were ignored whenever they got in the way of the tracks. Reservations shrank, hunting grounds disappeared, and starvation set in. To Washington, the railroad was destiny. To Native nations, it was the erasure of their way of life.
Native American nations like the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho were already at war with the United States and fiercely opposed construction of the railroad through their lands.
A man stands on a massive mound of Buffalo bones.
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The Golden Spike
On May 10, 1869, after six years of blasting, hammering, and hauling, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads finally met at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory. The moment was marked with a ceremonial golden spike, tapped into a polished laurelwood tie to connect the final rails.
Telegraph wires carried the word “DONE” across the country in real time, a nineteenth-century version of breaking news. In San Francisco, cannons thundered in celebration. In New York, church bells rang. Americans understood instantly that the age of coast-to-coast travel had arrived.
The numbers told the story: the finished line stretched 1,776 miles, linking Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. Two locomotives—the Central Pacific’s Jupiter and the Union Pacific’s No. 119—rolled forward until their pilots nearly touched. A famous photograph captured the crews and officials gathered between the engines, raising bottles and shaking hands. Newspapers called it the “wedding of the rails,” a phrase that stuck.
The golden spike itself didn’t stay in place. It was pulled almost immediately for safekeeping and replaced with a standard iron spike. Still, the image of that gleaming nail in the track became a powerful symbol of what the United States had accomplished: the stitching together of a nation with steel.
After years of construction, the two railroad companies connected their separate lines at Promontory Point in Utah Territory.
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Railroads, Robber Barons, and Rotten Deals
For all the triumph of the rails, corruption hitched a ride, too. The biggest mess was the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872. Here’s how it worked: Union Pacific executives created a construction company called Credit Mobilier of America. On paper, it looked like a legitimate contractor building the railroad. In reality, it was the same men on both sides of the deal—railroad leaders hiring themselves.
They charged the government wildly inflated rates for laying track—sometimes double what it really cost—then pocketed the difference. We’re talking millions of dollars skimmed off a project that taxpayers were funding. To make sure no one in Washington made too much noise about it, they handed out shares of Credit Mobilier stock to friendly politicians. Even the Vice President, Schuyler Colfax, had his name dragged into the mess.
When the scheme went public in 1872, it was a national scandal. Newspapers blasted the story, politicians scrambled to deny involvement, and the public got a crash course in how deeply business and politics were entangled. The railroads still got built, but the phrase “robber barons” started to stick—praise and disgust rolled into one.
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America on Fast-Forward
The six-month wagon slog became a seven-day ride. In 1870, a New York-to-San Francisco ticket ran $65 for an emigrant-class bench, $110 for second class, and if you wanted to be fancy, $136 for a Pullman sleeper with velvet curtains. Middle-class families could finally cross the continent without gambling their lives.
Freight roared too: wheat, coal, cattle, lumber heading east; factory goods rolling west. Cities like Chicago and Denver exploded into hubs. The railroad became the country’s steel bloodstream.
The railroads fixed one more thing—time. Every town used to set its own local noon by the sun. Great for stagecoaches, but chaos for trains. In 1883, the railroads drew four time zones across the U.S. Overnight, Americans were living on “railroad time.” The government didn’t make it official until 1918, but by then everyone was already running on the clock the railroads created.
Faster travel meant the need for a standardized time system.
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Why It Matters
The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad was a game-changer for the United States. A trip across the continent that once took months by wagon could now be done in about a week by train. Farmers could ship crops and cattle to distant markets, merchants had new customers, and families could move west with far less risk than before.
The railroad also reshaped daily life. To keep trains running smoothly, the companies created standardized time zones in 1883, and Americans adjusted their clocks to match. Freight rolled faster than ever, passengers crossed the country with ease, and towns along the tracks grew into thriving cities.
The project proved the U.S. could pull off an enormous undertaking. It tied the coasts together with steel, boosted the economy, and gave Americans a new sense of living in one connected nation.
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