The Transcontinental Railroad
The coming of the Transcontinental Railroad,
the first communications revolution in the USA.
The First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States was built in the 1860s, linking the developing railway network of the Eastern coast with California. Ceremonially completed on May 10, 1869, it gave America a nation-wide transportation network, forever changing the American West.
The rail line was one of the crowning achievements of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, completed four years after his death. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 chartered two private enterprises: the Union Pacific Railroad that built the line westward and the Central Pacific Railroad that built eastward.
The building of the railroad was motivated in part to bind California to the Union during the American Civil War. It accelerated the populating of the West by white homesteaders and freed slaves, while greatly contributing to the decline of the Native American culture in the regions it served.
The railroad was considered by some to be the greatest technological feat of the 19th century. The transcontinental railroad quickly ended the romantic yet far slower and more hazardous wagon trains, Pony Express and stagecoach lines that had preceded it.
The route followed the older Oregon, Mormon and California Trails. From Omaha, Nebraska it followed the Platte River, crossed the Rocky Mountains at South Pass in Wyoming and then cut down through northern Utah and Nevada before crossing the Sierras to Sacramento, California. The main route did not pass through the two biggest cities in the Great American Desert: Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah. Feeder lines were built to service those, and other cities.
The Central Pacific laid 690 miles (1,110 km) of track, starting in Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific laid 1,087 miles (1,749 km) of track, starting in Omaha, Nebraska. The two lines connected at Promontory Summit, Utah.
Early Discussions
Talk of a transcontinental railroad started in 1830, shortly after railroads began large scale operation in the United States and English-speaking settlers began settling in Mexican controlled California. Much of the early debate was not so much over whether it would be built, but what route it should follow: a "central" route, via the Platte River in Nebraska and the South Pass in Wyoming, or a southern route, avoiding the Rockies by going through Texas to Los Angeles. (A "northern" route explored by Lewis and Clark would have gone through northern Montana to Oregon and was considered impractical because of snow.)
The most prominent champion of the central route railroad at this time was Asa Whitney. Whitney envisioned a route from Chicago to northern California, paid for by the sale of land to settlers along the route.
In June 1845 Whitney led a team along the central route to assess its capabilities. Whitney travelled widely to solicit support from businessmen and politicians, printed maps and pamphlets, and submitted several proposals to Congress, all at his own expense. Legislation to begin construction of the Pacific Railroad via the central route was introduced in Congress but not acted on.
The Southern Route and the Gadsden Purchase
California came under formal United States control in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican-American War. Settlement of California skyrocketed with California Gold Rush of 1849.
Concerns lingered that snow would make the central route to California impractical. A survey indicated that the best southern path ran through the northernmost part of Mexico. Therefore in 1853, only five years after taking California by force, the United States made the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico, acquiring the southern portions of what is now New Mexico and Arizona, so the southern route would be entirely within the U.S. However, despite approving the purchase Congress did not support construction on the southern route (or any route) at that time. This route is generally that followed by Interstate 10 today.
The Central Route
From early 1861 until July, a party led by Theodore Judah, a rail construction engineer and Daniel Strong, a local miner, surveyed what became the selected route for the railroad over the Sierra Nevada, through Clipper Gap, Emigrant Gap, Donner Pass, and south to Truckee
Collis Huntington, a hardware merchant, heard Theodore Judah lecture on the possibilities of a transcontinental railroad in Sacramento in November 1860. Huntington sought to raise the money from partners who initially invested $1,500 each and formed a board of directors: Mark Hopkins, his business partner; James Bailey, a jeweller; Leland Stanford, a grocer and the future governor of California; and Charles Crocker, a dry-goods merchant. The investors became known as the Big Four and their railroad was called the Central Pacific Railroad.
The Pony Express which provided transcontinental mail service from 1860 to 1861 proved that the central route was viable during the winter. With the backing of the Big Four, the central route came to the fore.
The House of Representatives on May 6, 1862, and the Senate on June 20 finally approved it. Lincoln signed into law on July 1 an act establishing two main Rail lines -- the Central Pacific from the west and the Union Pacific from the east.
Besides land grants along the right-of-way, each railroad was subsidized $16,000 per mile ($9,940/km) built over an easy grade, $32,000 per mile ($19,880/km) in the high plains, and $48,000 per mile ($29,830/km) in the mountains. The terms encouraged the companies to construct excess miles of track, direct the line toward property owned by themselves, and in many other ways exploit the system.
Route of the first Transcontinental Railroad.
Original artwork by DanMS
subject to the GNU Free Documentation License
Once it was decided that the railroad would follow the central rather than the southern route, there was little question that the western terminus would be Sacramento. However, there was considerable intrigue over the eastern terminus. Abraham Lincoln himself selected Council Bluffs, near Omaha, as a result of visiting the site in 1859 while working as a private attorney, although the closest rail lines were 150 miles away. Feeder lines from Atchison and Kansas City, Kansas were supposed to meet the Union Pacific main line in central Nebraska and were to get the same land grant incentives as the Union Pacific.
Labor on the Transcontinental Railroad
The majority of the Union Pacific track was built by Irish laborers, veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, and Mormons who wished to see the railroad pass through Ogden, Utah. Mostly Chinese workers built the Central Pacific track. Most of the White men received between one and three dollars per day, but the workers from China received much less. Eventually, they went on strike and gained a small increase in salary.
In addition to track laying (which employed approximately 25% of the labor force), the operation also required the efforts of hundreds of blacksmiths, carpenters, engineers, masons, surveyors, teamsters, telegraphers, and cooks.
Rail work in the 1860's was hand work.
The Central Pacific Railroad
On January 8, 1863 Governor Leland Stanford officially broke ground in Sacramento, California, to begin construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. The Central Pacific made great progress along the Sacramento Valley. However construction was slowed, first by the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, then by the mountains themselves and most importantly by winter snowstorms.
The increasing necessity for tunneling then began to slow progress of the line yet again. To combat this, Central Pacific began to use the newly invented and very unstable nitro-glycerin explosives which accelerated both the rate of construction and the mortality of the laborers. Appalled by the losses, the Central Pacific began to use less volatile explosives and developed a method of placing the explosives in which the blasters worked from large suspended baskets which were then rapidly pulled to safety after the fuses were lit.
The Union Pacific Railroad
The enabling legislation for the Union Pacific required that no partner was to own more than 10 percent of the stock. However, the major investor was Thomas Clark Durant, who had made his stake money by smuggling Confederate cotton. Durant put up the money for stock in proxy's names and controlled about half the stock of the railroad.
The initial construction went over land that Durant owned around Omaha. Being paid by the mile, the railroad built many miles of extraneous track never venturing further than 40 miles from Omaha in the railroad's first 2 1/2 years.
With the end of the Civil War and increased government supervision, the Union Pacific began laying track west. The construction bid was handed to another company controlled by Durant, Crédit Mobilier.
Engraving by Vaningen Snyder
The construction proceeded very quickly at first because of the open terrain of the Great Plains. However, they soon encountered slowdowns as they entered Indian-held lands. The Native Americans living there saw the railroad as a violation of their treaties with the United States. War parties began to raid the labor camps that followed the progress of the line. Union Pacific responded by increasing security and by hiring marksmen to kill American Bison (commonly, but erroneously, known as buffalo) which were both a physical threat to trains and the primary food source for many of the Plains Indians. The Native Americans realized that the railroad threatened their existence. Security measures were further strengthened, and progress on the railroad continued.
The Famous Golden Spike
Six years after work began, laborers of the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east met at Promontory Summit, Utah. It was here on May 10, 1869 that Governor Stanford drove the Golden Spike (or the Last Spike), that symbolized the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Few were aware that the spike was merely gold plated, gold being much too soft for the purpose, and probably not billable.
In perhaps the world's first live mass-media event, the hammers and spike were wired to the telegraph line so that each hammer stroke would be heard as a click at telegraph stations nationwide. However, technical problems occurred, so clicks were actually sent by the telegraph operator.
As soon as the ceremonial "golden" spike had been replaced by an ordinary iron spike, a message was transmitted to both the East and West Coasts that read: "DONE." The country erupted in celebration upon receipt of this message. Complete travel from coast to coast was reduced from six or more months to just one week.
The First Transcontinental Railroad Journey
The American rail network was not yet connected to the Atlantic or the Pacific. What was heralded as the Transcontinental Railroad merely connected Omaha and Sacramento. In November 1869 the Sacramento line was extended to San Francisco Bay at Oakland.
At first, trains had to be ferried across the Missouri River to complete a transcontinental journey. The Hannibal Bridge in Kansas City was the first bridge to cross the Missouri, it was completed in July, 1869. In August 1870 the Kansas Pacific connected to the Denver Pacific line at Strasburg, Colorado and the first true Atlantic to Pacific railroad was completed. Council Bluffs was directly connected to the East Coast rail network upon completion of the Union Pacific Missouri River Bridge in 1872.
On June 4, 1876 an express train named the Transcontinental Express arrived in San Francisco via the Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after it left from New York City.
Remnants and Information for Tourists
Having been bypassed by a shorter route in 1904, the Promontory Summit rails were pulled up in 1942 to be recycled for the World War II effort. This process began with a ceremonial "undriving" at the Golden Spike location. The Union Pacific RR was in bankruptcy less than three years after the completion of the line as details surfaced about overcharges by Credit Mobilier for the building of the railroad. The scandal was one of the biggest of the 19th century.
Hundreds of miles of the historic TCRR line are still in service today, especially through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and canyons in Utah and Wyoming. While the original rails and ties have long since been replaced because of age and wear, and the roadbed has been upgraded and repaired, the lines generally run on top of the original, handmade grade. Vista points on Interstate 80 through California's Truckee Canyon provide a panoramic view of many miles of the original Central Pacific line.
In many areas where the original line has been bypassed and abandoned, primarily in Utah, the road grade is still obvious, as are numerous cuts and fills, especially the "Big Fill" a few miles east of Promontory.
Amtrak runs the California Zephyr rail service from Emeryville, California (San Francisco Bay Area) to Chicago using the original Transcontinental Railroad route from Sacramento to Winnemucca, Nevada. The Zephyr often uses the original route on the westbound runs from Winnemucca to Wells, Nevada. The eastbound runs between these towns usually use more recent tracks built by the Western Pacific Railroad.
The Transcontinental Railroad
extensively revised and edited from Wikipedia.
Additional material added.
Wikipedia material is subject to the terms of use of Wikipedia.org
For Beautiful Jewelry of Nepal and Tibet
See: JewelryTibet.com.