By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
The first transcontinental railroad, planned in the 1850s, but delayed by the Civil War, was built between 1866 and 1869 by the Central Pacific Railroad Company, moving east from Sacramento, California, and by the Union Pacific Railroad, moving west from Omaha, Nebraska. Both companies heavily subsidized with land grants and direct cash payments from the federal government.
Connecting Transcontinentals
The Central Pacific builders in particular, many of them Chinese immigrants, had to overcome horrific difficulties in crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Tunneling near the summit of the mountains took three years, but both companies faced daunting technical and supply challenges because the distances were so great.
Completion of the railroad in May of 1869 cut travel time from the Mississippi to the West Coast from something like three months down to about one week, with times continuing to shrink after that.
This first transcontinental line was joined by other transcontinentals in the following decades. Then, spur lines linking up the transcontinentals were gradually built, so that by the end of the century, a comprehensive nationwide railroad system had been built. That made it possible for the plains and mountain states, previously far too remote, to be settled for the first time.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
An Expensive Endeavor
Railways had been pioneered in Britain back in the very early 1800s, and they caught on quickly in America after about 1830. The great improvement of railways over road transport, especially in the days of horse- and ox-drawn carts, was that the railroads presented a very low-friction environment.
Having a smooth steel wheel running against a smooth metal rail means that there’s far less resistance to overcome, and that enables one locomotive to pull many times its own weight in railroad carriages and cars. However, the track has to be well engineered for that to happen. Trains can’t climb up or go down steep gradients, so hills have to be cut through, valleys have to be elevated, every little valley has to be bridged, the curves have to be gentle, and so on.
This means that the engineering of the initial track makes capital costs very high. That meant that raising money to build railroads in both countries, Britain and America, and then also acquiring real estate, usually through the right of eminent domain, that is compulsory purchase from the prior owner, required intensive political lobbying.
And in America, particularly, it required a great deal of bribery. The politics and the economics of railroad building is, therefore, a tangled and sometimes rather ugly story.
How Railroad Network Helped the Union
Nevertheless, the building of a railroad network had immense and obvious advantages, which were far too great to be overlooked. They accelerated industrialization, and they made far greater levels of personal mobility possible than had ever been true before.
They also gave a crucial advantage to the Union during the Civil War, because the North already had a far denser railroad network by 1861 than did the South, which enabled it to move troops quickly from one place to the next.
Plans for a transcontinental railroad had been intensely debated in Congress in the 1850s, but then were delayed by the sectional strife that eventuated in war. It was during the Civil War that Congress authorized the Union Pacific Railroad to begin building westward from the River Missouri, and the Central Pacific to build eastward from Sacramento.
Construction of the Railways
Construction began in earnest once the war had finished. At first, the Union Pacific builders made fairly rapid progress over the Great Plains, a level area. The work gangs who did most of the construction were about half Union army veterans from the Civil War, and about half Irish immigrants.
The whole thing was run by a pair of Union army veterans—Dan and Jack Casement—and they ran it with military precision.
An immense mobile camp built the railway. It extended steadily westward across the Plains. It had to include sleeping cars so that the hundreds of workmen there would have a place to sleep, inside railway carriages, very often with blacksmiths and carpenters. There also had to be provision for a constant flow of supply trains bringing up equipment and provisions from back East. There had to be a situation, then, where new trains could regularly arrive, bringing the materials to continue the work.
A Great Project
Andrew Carnegie, a steel manufacturer, was one of the people who were producing the rails that were being laid across the Great Plains. The track was laid on transverse wooden bars called ties, but in the Great Plains there was no forest; it was grassland. Therefore, the wood for the ties itself had to be brought in from elsewhere.
It set off a great boom in the forestry industry in Michigan and Wisconsin, very often with trees being felled there, shipped across Lake Michigan to Chicago, and then shipped out from Chicago towards the railheads. In other words, gradually the whole economy of the nation was becoming involved in the building of this great project.
Common Questions about Building America’s First Transcontinental Railroad
The railroad track had to be well engineered to create a low-friction environment, enabling one locomotive to pull many times its own weight in railroad carriages and cars . Trains couldn’t climb up or go down steep gradients, so hills had to be cut through, valleys had to be elevated, every little valley had to be bridged, the curves had to be gentle, and so on. This meant that the capital costs were very high for engineering of the initial tracks.
Building of a railway network accelerated industrialization, and also made far greater levels of personal mobility possible than had ever been true before. It also gave a crucial advantage to the Union during the Civil War, because the North had a far denser railroad network already by 1861 than did the South, which enabled it to move troops quickly from one place to the next.
In the Great Plains, the railway track was laid on transverse wooden bars called ties, but there was no forest there; it was grassland. Therefore, the wood for the ties had to be brought in from elsewhere. This set off a great boom in the forestry industry in Michigan and Wisconsin.
