The Transcontinental Railroad By: Byung-A

You’re building the Transcontinental Railroad. This is only your first day building. You have been struggling for a long time now. Mining, blowing up mountains, attaching new rails every 2-3 minutes, but one thing that is most common you face is pain. You feel so exhausted, weak, and injured that your hands start turning so red it bleeds like you’re holding on a hot metal pole for an hour. Finally, you hear, “LUNCH TIME!” You took a lunch break at 3:00 p.m. But by the time you have decided that you’re done having a lunch break, you have just started a long lasting build. The railroad has only just begun. Now in present days, you don’t need to struggle building a 1,800 mile railroad by hand. You got vehicles to do the work for you. But back then, railroads like the ones we see now were a big difference between the present day railroads. They were built by hand, and was a major struggle for the men to build it from Sacramento, California, to Promontory, Utah.

The railroad all started as a person named Theodore Judah that thought of the idea of building the Transcontinental Railroad. Along with 4 men named Leland Stanford, Collins P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. Soon, Abraham Lincoln, president of the U.S., signed the “Railroad act of 1862.” The railroad was set and approved to be built by men. Since the railroad was going to be more than 1,000 miles long, men were divided into 2 different groups to build the railroad. The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific. They were each ordered to build in different locations. However, they would both end up meeting each other eventually. The Central Pacific was ordered to build from Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific to build from Omaha, Nebraska. There were many types of people building the Transcontinental Railroad. But the most common workers to build the railroad were Chinese men. Otherwise, men from the CIvil war would help build the railroad and also for military protection. In total, it was calculated that around 20,000 men would help build the Transcontinental Railroad. But it wasn’t always easy to build the railroad by hand.

When the railroad first started being built under construction, people had to blow up mountains to make tunnels. Unfortunately, the explosives they used (black powder) could only blow up to 10-12 inches a day and most of the blowing was by the Chinese workers. The largest tunnel they blew was an accurate measurement of 1,659 feet long.

6 years past for the people to build the railroad. Later, on May 10th, 1869, both the Union Pacific and Central Pacific both met in Promontory, Utah. they had finally completed the Transcontinental Railroad. To celebrate the accomplished railroad, they added the “golden spike” which can be seen in Stanford University. Later on, the railroad became a very common source for a lot of people for transportation in the 1800’s. Now in days, we use cars, planes, and different kinds of vehicles to travel across land or water. Furthermore to the railroad, there were additional rails included to the Transcontinental Railroad later on.

Now, the Transcontinental Railroad stands out a transportation vehicle and a major accomplishment to the U.S. after the Civil war. Now, people still ride on the Transcontinental Railroad and it still stands out in many places. The railroad is one of the most well known transporters that is efficiently used for traveling across state to state. Now, it is still an important memory to us and others to remember.