What was the Transcontinental Railroad?

The Transcontinental Railroad was the first railway across the continental United States, completed when the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad met at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory on May 10, 1869, where Leland Stanford drove the ceremonial Golden Spike to mark the joining of about 1,907 miles of new track from Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, California. The Pacific Railway Act of July 1, 1862, signed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, authorized federal subsidies and land grants to the two companies.

The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento under Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford (collectively the Big Four). The Union Pacific built west from Omaha under Thomas C. Durant and Grenville Dodge. Construction was a massive undertaking. The Central Pacific blasted and tunneled through the Sierra Nevada, including the Summit Tunnel through 1,659 feet of solid granite, working through brutal winters and lethal avalanches. The Union Pacific raced across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.

The labor force was extraordinarily diverse. The Central Pacific employed about 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese workers, originally about 90 percent of its workforce, who proved essential to crossing the Sierra Nevada and were paid less and treated worse than white workers. The Union Pacific employed Irish immigrants, Civil War veterans of both sides, and freed slaves.

Both companies benefited from huge federal subsidies in cash and land grants of about 21 million acres total. They also engaged in extensive corruption and waste, exemplified by the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872, in which Union Pacific insiders inflated construction costs through a sham construction company and bribed members of Congress.

The completion ceremony at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869 included telegraphic linking with the rest of the country so that crowds in cities like Washington and New York could hear the hammer strikes in real time. The Golden Spike (made of 17.6 carat gold) was driven and then immediately removed and replaced with an ordinary iron spike for the working track.

The transcontinental connection cut cross-country travel time from about six months by wagon or sea to about a week by train. It enabled rapid migration to the West, accelerated agricultural settlement of the Great Plains, integrated regional economies into a national market, and contributed to the displacement and confinement of Native peoples to reservations as their lands became accessible to settlement. Additional transcontinental routes followed: the Northern Pacific to Tacoma in 1883, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe to Los Angeles in 1885, the Southern Pacific from El Paso to Los Angeles in 1881, and the Great Northern in 1893.