transcontinental railway

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World

by Christian Wolmar  · 1 Mar 2010  · 424pp  · 140,262 words

examined. The function of railways in several European wars is also considered. Chapters 6 and 7 tell the amazing stories of how and why the transcontinental railways were built. Chapter 6 covers the disastrous Panama Railway whose construction cost the lives of thousands of men and took far longer than expected, but

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US railroad history, first as the lawyer representing the railroad in this case but, more importantly, by later becoming the major political support of the transcontinental railroad. The Effie Aflon case inevitably became a test of the much wider issue of whether the right of railroads to traverse rivers prevailed over those

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Court which declared that bridges were not a hazard to navigation. 37 The way to the West was opened up and the dream of a transcontinental railroad soon became a reality, but not before the country was rent apart by the Civil War. By the 1850s the railroads had become more than

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eastern part of the country and much of the South but the lines heading west stopped at the major rivers. The great project for a transcontinental railroad, first conceived by the early rail pioneers thirty years previously, and actively promoted in the mid-1850s, would have to wait. The Civil War was

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one notable exception, would eventually be breached, opening up the whole world to the iron road. CROSSING AMERICA… As already mentioned, the idea of a transcontinental railway for the USA was mooted very soon after the pioneers of the iron road had laid the first lines. And so it was on other

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massive projects, the most ambitious in the history of humankind, faced seemingly insuperable difficulties and invariably ended up costing far more than the original estimates. Transcontinental railways were the ultimate grand projets, which inevitably made them the creature of government as they were not remotely feasible without state involvement. Often inspired by

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and railway promoters than in practical transport economics, though, ultimately, several proved profitable. The story does, of course, start with America which built the first transcontinental railway but, surprisingly, that was not in the United States but in Central America through Panama. In a way the development of that railway had the

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than that, a project which went to the very depth of the American psyche: ‘For all the fanfare that accompanied the building of the first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s… the importance of this accomplishment for many years was psychological.’ 6 While that may have been the case, there was pork barrel

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railroad. Two rival companies had been created to build the railway: the Central Pacific, the brainchild of Thomas Judah, who had long lobbied for a transcontinental railroad and created the company in 1860, and the Union Pacific, set up by Dr Thomas Durrant, which would work its way west from Omaha in

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his railway to any local notables with a few hundred dollars to spare. Judah did not attempt to set out a grand vision of a transcontinental railway but, instead, presented the railway in a way that would appeal to his small-town audience, an opportunity to make a quick buck to transport

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have been complete, it was a ramshackle affair, with enormous curves and poor track which slowed down trains, making long journeys tortuous affairs. Although the transcontinental railroad was vitally important for the development of the USA, in order to open up other parts of the western United States, other railroad companies received

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section, the Grand Trunk Pacific, cost a similar amount, $140m, by the time of its completion in April 1914. The folly of building a third transcontinental railway was highlighted by the fact that the Grand Trunk ran parallel to the first one, the Canadian Pacific, for 135 miles between Winnipeg and Brandon

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inhospitable land in the world – although, thankfully for its engineers, much of it, in western and central Siberia, relatively flat. Just as with the American transcontinental railway, there had been dreams of improved transport to Russia’s furthest lands for several decades. However, Russia in the early age of the railways could

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made it easier for the major Western nations to reach the Pacific side of Russian territory than for Russia itself. The building of the American transcontinental railway and the beginnings of the Panama Canal project raised fears among the Russian elite that the country’s territorial integrity would be threatened by the

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Railway for much of its length! Africa presented a rather different set of obstacles which ultimately proved insuperable, and the rather insane ambition to create transcontinental railways on different axes by the two big imperial powers of the day – north–south for the British, east-west by the French – nearly precipitated them

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Railway had stimulated further development of the iron road in Sudan to serve local interests rather than as part of the grand design of a transcontinental railway. The railway reached Kosti, 240 miles south of Khartoum in 1911, from where a ship could be taken up the Nile to Juba. There followed

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build it in 1943 but that attempt was soon abandoned, finally putting an end to the whole madcap concept. Australia, too, would eventually boast a transcontinental railway and, amazingly, its north–south line, the Ghan, named after the Afghan camel trains which used to trek along the same route, was only completed

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1896 from Perth and Port Augusta, the South Australian railhead. It was an enterprise that may not have been on the scale of the other transcontinental railways as it was only 1,050 miles long but was nevertheless remarkable, not least because it was undertaken quickly at a time when the world

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having built railways in three gauges. 40 It was only in 1970 that Australia’s intercity route was finally converted to standard gauge. While these transcontinental railways were the biggest projects of their day, the period in which they were being built, particularly the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was the

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the most inhospitable parts of the world. There were no boundaries, physical, social or topographical, which could prevent their progress or delay their dominance. The transcontinental railways may have been the headline stealers in terms of their ambition but they were by no means the only ones to overcome remarkable obstacles. Mountains

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

by Simon Winchester  · 14 Oct 2013  · 501pp  · 145,097 words

Oregon Trail, he became notorious for his Messianic, eye-gleaming boosterism, quite detached from reality. The need to sketch out the possible routes for a transcontinental railway led the Civil War hero Gouverneur Warren to draw one of the finest and most accurate early maps of the American West. Two billion people

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and the Central Pacific’s Jupiter, had met, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, on the lines that were to be joined by the famous golden spike. The transcontinental railroad had been completed, and trains were from this moment on crossing regularly between America’s Eastern cities and those in the West. And in doing

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his youth, he came up with an ambitious plan for surveying a cross section of the country along the route then being created for the transcontinental railway. In 1867, the year when the government in Washington so suddenly began to make a serious inventory of the country and created its Four Great

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act of will, a practicable route, a formidable design, a great deal of money, and more hard work than the nation had ever witnessed. The transcontinental railroad, which would allow and encourage travel from ocean to ocean—with a promised journey time of days, not months—was the prize above all others

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almost half of a party of westbound pioneers had died in 1846, trapped by an early-season snowstorm, was the ideal route to take a transcontinental railroad over the most difficult mountain barrier of them all. I first crossed the Donner Pass late in the 1980s. It was early spring, and I

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a party of would-be pioneers who were trapped by its ferocious winter weather. Judah saw the pass as providing the obvious route for the transcontinental railroad, nonetheless; it remains today the key Union Pacific main line between Nevada and California. Theodore Judah saw it in a split second. The pair duly

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for a good-size train to cross the passes once the line had been built. The saga of the subsequent construction of America’s first transcontinental railroad is now painted in the nation’s most hallowed self-portraits. In essence, it involves two giant railway companies—the privately financed Central Pacific, based

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to undertake the various sections of the line from Omaha to Sacramento—the same route, more or less, that would soon be taken by the transcontinental railway. By the time construction began in the early summer of 1861, the Civil War was well under way. The attack on Fort Sumter, the generally

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theater in Council Bluffs, Iowa, close to the great gold-colored spike that marks the spot that Abraham Lincoln declared the starting point for the transcontinental railroad. Lewis and Clark passed down the Columbia River in 1804, and then half a century later, the settlers and their wagons rumbled along nearby on

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National Museum of American History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981. Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Huebsch, 1919; Signet Classics, 1993. Anfinson, John O. The River We Have

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. Chaining Oregon: Surveying the Public Lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851–1855. Blacksburg, VA: McDonald & Woodward, 2008. Bain, David Haward. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking, 1999. Bakeless, John. The Eyes of Discovery: America as Seen by the First Explorers. New York: Dover, 1961. Barone, Michael, and Chuck

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. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York: Random House, 1973. Borneman, Walter R. Rival Rails: The Race to Build America’s Greatest Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Random House, 2010. Brands, H. W. American Dreams: The United States since 1945. New York: Penguin Press, 2010. Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson

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; Signet Classics, 1992. McCague, James. Moguls and Iron Men: The Dramatic Story of the Dreamers and Doers Who Spanned the American Continent with the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. McCartney, Laton. Across the Great Divide: Robert Stuart and the Discovery of the Oregon Trail. New York: Free Press, 2003

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de (French naval officer), 176–78 Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Company. See Pony Express Central Pacific Railroad, 117, 266, 267–77. See also transcontinental railroad Cerf, Vint (Internet pioneer), 422–23 Charbonneau, Jean-Baptiste “Pomp” (son of Sacagawea), 51 Charbonneau, Toussaint (fur trapper), 49–50 Charles II (king of England

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, 16–17 Northwest Territories, 14–16 role of David Dale Owen, 88–91 role of “settler movement,” 91–96 Survey of California (1864), 140–41 transcontinental railroad routes, 258 US Army Corps of Engineers, 233 Warren Map (1858), 108–10 See also rivers/river exploration geology, role in American settlement, 75–77

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control, 233–34, 290–91 Lewis and Clark expedition, 22–24, 33–35, 40, 59 Native American settlement, 231 origins in Montana, 130–31 starting transcontinental railroad at, 266–67 Montana Beaver’s Head rock, 60 Corps of Discovery entry, 54–56 Gates of the Mountains, 56–58 land boom of 1990s

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moving military vehicles, 284 passenger traffic, the automobile and, 278–80 role of slavery, 263 unifying role in America, 237, 257–58, 413 See also transcontinental railroad Ralston, William (banker), 143–50 Randolph, Isham (engineer), 215, 219–20 Rappahannock River, 168–69 Raynolds, William F. (military officer/explorer), 108 Reed, Donna (actress

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system and routes, 300–304 planning/building Alaska Highway, 299, 310–12 planning/building Interstate Highway System, 304–10 See also roads/roadways/road building transcontinental railroad authorization by Congress, 266–67 beginning surveys for, 258 Ceremony of Golden Spike, 273 construction, 267–72 crossing Missouri River, 276 meeting at Promontory Summit

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–8, 413–14 water, xxi–xxii wood, xxi Union Pacific Railroad, 24, 53–54, 117, 139, 238, 266, 267, 270–78, 309–10. See also transcontinental railroad United States of America about uniqueness and nature of, xv–xxv Continentalism and Manifest Destiny, 30–32, 100, 109 count of administrative units, xviii evolution

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time

by Stephen Fried  · 23 Mar 2010  · 603pp  · 186,210 words

biggest railroad deal in the country, spending over $4 million ($88 million) lobbying in Washington to ensure the High Iron of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad came right through the city and the fort. It was during the nationwide competition for the right to build a railroad from the Missouri River

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get some train service at last—but just a minor branch line. The Kansas Pacific—the local division of the company chosen to build the transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific—laid tracks between Leavenworth and Lawrence, where passengers could change trains onto the High Iron to go east to Kansas City, or

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to describe the stink.) EVERY TIME THE TRAIN lines lengthened, Fred’s horizons expanded even further. In the spring of 1869, the nation’s first transcontinental railroad was finally completed. It was considered the greatest technological achievement in American history and the turning point for the country—over seventeen hundred miles of

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city he visited, the local papers carried bigger and bigger stories about a financial scandal involving the builders of the transcontinental railroad. Union Pacific executives were accused of looting profits from the transcontinental railroad through a questionable company they created and gave a foreign-sounding name: Crédit Mobilier. Not only did this company receive

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Civil War by selling war bonds and who, in peacetime, became incredibly powerful by underwriting railroad development. Cooke’s current obsession was building his own transcontinental railroad, a train line directly to the Pacific Northwest. He attempted to float $300 million ($5.6 billion) in government railroad bonds to build his new

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all the sleepers not only for the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the dominant lines in the East, but also for the Union Pacific’s new transcontinental railway. By the 1870s, the Pullman name had become synonymous with traveling in comfort. YET THERE WAS ONE area of the passenger service business that eluded

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western resort in the same league as the Montezuma: the Del Monte, which the Southern Pacific had built in Monterey. Finally they connected with the transcontinental railway heading east through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska, crossing the Missouri River, and returning to civilization. As they headed home, other groups of Raymond excursionists

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the United States. As the fair wound down, the railroad industry was rocked by the news that the Union Pacific, which had built the first transcontinental railroad, was going bankrupt. The Santa Fe managed to hold on, largely due to the efforts of its chairman of the board, George Magoun. A powerful

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32 (1990). Badash, Lawrence, Joseph O. Hirschfelder, and Herbert P. Broida. Reminiscences of Los Alamos. Boston: Reidel, 1980. Bain, David. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking, 1999. Bancroft, Frederic. Slave-Trading in the Old South. Baltimore: J. H. Furst Company, 1931. Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Robert J. Gordon  · 12 Jan 2016  · 1,104pp  · 302,176 words

economics became much more adequate with the first Census of Manufacturing, carried out in 1869, a year that coincidentally brought the nation together when the transcontinental railroad was joined at Promontory Summit in Utah. Our starting point in 1870 should not be taken to diminish the progress that had been made in

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IN 1870 A quintessential symbol of the American advance and future promise is captured by the 1869 hammering of the golden spike that united the transcontinental railway. This story combines the British invention of the railroad, rapidly adapted to the much larger land mass of the United States, with the American invention

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threw their oppressive shadow over the celebrations of our victories during the war for the Union.”9 The joining together of the nation through a transcontinental railroad and instantaneous telegraphic communication together symbolize how much the American standard of living had improved by 1870. After millennia in which the life of rural

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weight, which cracked street pavements. LEISURE, FROM NEWSPAPERS TO SALOONS By 1870, the American invention of the telegraph had announced the joining together of the transcontinental railway, had in 1861 made the Pony Express obsolete, and had allowed local print newspapers to report the events of national and world affairs on the

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, the United States had built a 60,000-mile network of rail transport and was connected by steamships to every continent. The completion of the transcontinental railway with the “golden spike” ceremony at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, was heralded in chapter 2 as creating a dividing line in the

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, traversing Kansas and Nebraska, and two were quite close together in their paths through the sparsely populated Dakotas and Montana.12 The building of the transcontinental railroads is a tale of ambitious entrepreneurs, leverage and shady finance, and repeated business failures that twice contributed to financial panics that dragged the nation’s

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prices. The arrival of the railroad and its elimination of seasonal travel restrictions was a gradual process. By subsequent standards, the technology of the first transcontinental railroad, joining the Central Pacific from Sacramento to Utah and the Union Pacific from Utah to Omaha, was primitive. The early locomotives could barely pull loads

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the second and third group, for some patent medicines included opium as an ingredient. By the 1880s, Chinese immigrants, originally recruited to build the first transcontinental railway, had established Chinese enclaves in San Francisco and elsewhere and set up opium dens, spreading addiction to the native population. Not just opium and its

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” (2014). IMDB.com, Inc. http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm. Ambrose, Stephen E. (2000). Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863–1869. New York: Simon & Schuster. American Academy of Neurology. (2014). “Study: Alzheimer’s Disease Much Larger Cause of Death Than Reported [Press Release],” AAN

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration

by Kent E. Calder  · 28 Apr 2019

the pages to follow. A century ago and more ago, a Super Continent began to rise on American shores, its connectivity assured by ­infrastructure—a transcontinental railway, consolidated by the Golden Spike at Promontory Point (1869), and a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific, completed across Panama (1914). Only a few

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Spike in the desert of Utah, at Promontory Point, just before 1 p.m. on May 10, 1869. That ceremonial act completed construction of the Transcontinental Railway, linking America’s east and west coasts overland. It reduced the overland travel time between New York and California from six months to two weeks

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Pacific but also the mutual worth, to both America and East Asian peoples also, of trans-Pacific ties.3 xiv Introduction Concrete proposals for a transcontinental railroad began emerging in the 1830s, with Asa Whitney, a New York merchant who had recently visited China, making a proposal in 1845 for a railroad

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for the railroad, in 1862.8 Together with mundane economic considerations, especially prominent among the builders themselves, geopolitics also figured in the building of the transcontinental railway. As William Gilpin, arguably America’s first geopolitician, wrote presciently in 1860, America’s “intermediate geographical position between Asia and Europe and their populations, invests

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threats from rivals. Confederate incursions had reached as far as New Mexico, while England was financing railroads across Canada. Meanwhile France was also building a transcontinental railway across Mexico, creating the danger that both Britain and France could potentially have closer contact with California than the Union’s east coast, distracted by

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, rendered urgent by the exigencies of civil war, may have figured prominently in creating the continentalist policy framework, it was private enterprise that brought the transcontinental railway to actual fruition. Leland Stanford, who became governor of California in 1861, played a key role, both in government and later as president of the

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America’s ascent to global power—also accomplished through new infrastructural connections—was the building of the Panama Canal. As in the case of the transcontinental railroad, the actual construction was preceded by a lengthy period of conceptualization, change in national political-economic incentives, and consensus building. The result was a clear

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conversion of America’s international standing from regional into full-fledged global power. Conceptualization began even before completion of the transcontinental railway itself, although not by Americans. In 1869 Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, an entrepreneurial French aristocrat, completed construction of the Suez Canal, with an eye to

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infrastructure can literally reconfigure geography and, in the course of redrawing the map, that new connectivity can also transform the face of world affairs. The Transcontinental Railroad and the Panama Canal in combination consolidated North America as a Super Continent, integrated economically and strategically, with a powerful, flexible presence in both the

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largely invisible to participants. Distributive policies include the land-grant programs authorized by the 1862 Morrill Act, which generated funds for building of the US transcontinental railway. China’s Belt and Road Initiative arguably often has this distributive, “win-win” character for those directly involved, which could well aid its global reception

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regarding cross-border infrastructure came on the heels of a boundary agreement between the two countries.29 Ultimately this high-level Eurasian diplomacy led to transcontinental railroads, pipelines, and an SEZ established in Xinjiang’s Ili Valley near the Kazakh frontier to encourage cross-border exchange.30 By 2010 pipelines transported 200

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its land power and economic strength leveraging its maritime efforts to forge a Super Continent much as the United States did after construction of the transcontinental railway and the Panama Canal increased connectivity and mobility over a century ago. Changing logistics technology, plus massive infrastructure spending coupled with control of strategic seaports

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other major powers in global governance. The era of the Eurasian Super Continent has begun. Notes preface 1. Linda Hall Library, “The Pacific Railway,” The Transcontinental Railroad, https://​ railroad​.lindahall​.org/​essays/​brief​-history​.html 2. Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1892 –99), IX, 351, quoted

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Missouri’s first senators in 1821, and continued advocating westward expansion throughout his thirty-year service in the Senate. 4. Jon Debo Galloway, The First Transcontinental Railroad: Central Pacific, Union Pacific (New York: Simmons-Boardman, 1950), 32 –33. 5. Ibid., 38. 6. Felix Rohatyn, Bold Endeavors (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 51

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under heaven). See China: approach of to global order (tianxia) Train OSE (Greek railway company), 88 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), 212, 242 Transcontinental Railroad, xiii, xiv–xv, xvi Transit trade, as catalyst for deeper integration, 77, 84 –93, 98 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 203, 212, 224, 234 Transportation networks

The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885

by Pierre Berton  · 1 Jan 1971  · 612pp  · 200,406 words

in the north, and the far western plains might have filled up at an earlier date. Sooner or later, of course, branch lines or new transcontinental railways would also have brought settlers to the southern plains, but by then the pattern of the North West would have been set and that pattern

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Canadian North West. Tyler had never thought of the CPR as a competitor. Indeed, until the contract was signed in 1880, he considered the entire transcontinental railway scheme an elaborate political pipe dream, designed to get votes. Even if it was built it would never threaten the Grand Trunk. It would start

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Clause. Because of the British North America Act the clause did not prevent the provinces from chartering lines to the border in competition with the transcontinental railway. This was Stephen’s fear. The Liberal press was already crying “Monopoly!” Stephen wanted the Prime Minister to counter this opposition by exerting pressure on

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that he meant to link the Quebec line with the Northern Pacific at Sault Ste Marie; thus the country faced the possibility of a Yankee transcontinental railway mainly on Canadian soil. But there was more: By taking the faltering railway off the hands of the Quebec government, Villard would be buying considerable

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. It is small wonder, then, that almost from the outset Andrew Onderdonk began hiring Chinese in spite of a volley of protests. The United States transcontinental railway system had already established the efficiency of coolie labour. The first Chinese to work on any railway were imported by that colourful and gargantuan innovator

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Stephen’s disastrous gamble 6 The CPR goes political 1 The Promised Land By the spring of 1883, Canada was a country with half a transcontinental railroad. Between Port Moody and Ottawa, the track lay in pieces like a child’s train set – long stretches of finished road separated by formidable gaps

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march to the Rockies in 1874; he bargained with Sitting Bull after the Custer affair; now he was presiding at the building of the first transcontinental railway; he would go on to become “the Lion of the Yukon” during the Klondike gold-rush. Steele was the prototype Mountie, one of several who

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out of World War I a major-general and went on to become the largest contractor in the West, helping to build another ill-fated transcontinental railroad, the Grand Trunk Pacific, and founding, for the Liberal Party of British Columbia, a lively newspaper, the Vancouver Sun. After the turn of the century

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wave of Canadian “utility imperialism” (as one historian has called it) – building power plants, railways, and streetcar lines all over Latin America and two more transcontinental railways in Canada. William Mackenzie helped to launch in São Paulo the gigantic Brazilian Traction corporation, a firm that was to grow almost as big as

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: its entire debt was only one third that of the Northern Pacific on a mileage basis, and even less in comparison with other United States transcontinental railways. The CPR’S advantage as a through line was greater, and the road itself was far better built. But Van Horne’s real expression of

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a maddening dilemma: as soon as the CPR became a through line the profits would roll in, for it held a mileage advantage over other transcontinental railroads. Goods arriving from the Orient could speed across Canada to the Atlantic far faster than any rival road could carry them. But could the CPR

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the railway, these new aids to communication would help stitch the awkward archipelago of population islands into a workable transcontinental reality. The concept of a transcontinental railway was also responsible for changing the casual attitude towards time. Heretofore every city and village had operated on its own time system. When it was

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it had not previously been able to do. Much of the credit for this went to Sandford Fleming, the man who had originally planned the transcontinental railway in Canada. More than twenty years before, when Fleming was first contemplating the idea of the Canadian Pacific, he had realized that the plan would

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Indians and fur traders. Then, when the Americans seemed on the point of appropriating it by default, he had pushed the bold plan for a transcontinental railway. Suddenly once again he seemed to have lost interest. The railway was floundering in a financial swamp; the West was about to burst into flame

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of giving in without a fight. He was prepared to oppose the relief bill as he had opposed the whole concept of a privately owned transcontinental railway from the very beginning. His speeches were now lasting for six hours and wearying the House. To Stephen, however, they must have seemed extraordinarily effective

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make such documents available. With that attitude, of course, I must vigorously disagree. Anything that has to do with the beginnings of Canada’s first transcontinental railway is in the public interest. After all, that is what these books have been about.

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad

by Christian Wolmar  · 4 Aug 2014  · 323pp  · 94,406 words

were many reasons for Russia not to have built the Trans-Siberian Railway – and very few to build it. While by 1869 America boasted a transcontinental railway and Canada, more relevantly, followed suit sixteen years later, Russia was different. Unlike most of Europe, which had embraced liberalism to accommodate the needs of

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and its climate was far harsher than the western regions of Canada and the United States, which had begun to be settled thanks to their transcontinental railways. It seemed to offer little to attract potential immigrants who would be needed to justify the massive cost of constructing the line. Given the likely

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construction an unparalleled feat. To give a measure of the scale, at 5,750 miles it was longer by 2,000 miles than the Canadian transcontinental railway between St John’s, Newfoundland, on the Atlantic and Vancouver in British Columbia on the Pacific, and that had been built in stages. The First

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factors or to local interests. In fact, this philosophy of getting the job done as quickly as possible had dictated the way the First American Transcontinental railway had been built in the 1860s, except that there it was money and greed which determined the need for speedy construction, since the line was

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bulldozers, 239 Bunge, Nikolai, 26, 62 Burr, Malcolm, 209–10 Buryats, 166 Canada, and Russian civil war, 188 Canadian Pacific railroad, 37, 116, 136 Canadian transcontinental railroad, 1, 38, 94 canals, 13, 82 Cape–Cairo railway, 75 carriages all-metal, 222 church carriages, 111, 133, 158, 170 decoration of, 206 numbers of

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Fleet, Russian, 126 ferries, 4, 90–1, 101, 103, 106, 121 Figes, Orlando, 177, 183, 189, 192 films, Soviet, 204–5 Finland, 174 First American Transcontinental Railroad, 2, 64, 67, 79, 244 First World War, xvi, 9, 137, 154, 158, 161, 172, 218, 225 Fleming, Peter, 180, 182, 186, 190, 195, 201

The First Tycoon

by T.J. Stiles  · 14 Aug 2009

brought Banker and Schell onto the board. Aha! the press collectively exclaimed—the rise of Clark shows that the Commodore now has control of the transcontinental railroad, and will divert its traffic onto the Central.25 But no evidence points to Vanderbilt's involvement in the Union Pacific, as some contemporaries observed

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, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 147–71. 18 My discussion is informed by John Lauritz Larson's analysis of the early fights over the transcontinental railroad, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 243

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Modern Business Administration,” in Bruce Mazlish, The Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 152; Julius Grodinsky, Transcontinental Railway Strategy, 1869–1893: A Study of Businesmen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 5–6. 14 WHV to JFJ, January 29, 1868, JFJP See also

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), 764, Erie Railway Company Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School. For an important article on railroads and corruption, see Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” JEH 90, no. 1 (June 2003): 19–43. White's discussion, while perceptive, treats the corruption of financial information as a

The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar  · 9 Jun 2014  · 523pp  · 159,884 words

5. US Rail Network, 2010 ILLUSTRATIONS 1. The Atlantic locomotive built by Phineas Davis 2. The Best Friend of Charleston 3. Completion of the first transcontinental railroad 4. Railroad travelers shooting buffalo 5. The ticket office of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad 6. The Immigrants’ Guide to the Most Fertile Lands of

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folklore but somewhat obscured the true story of the railroads in this conflict. The fifth chapter tells the story of the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. The dream of a coast-to-coast line had first been mooted as early as 1820, but it was not until

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railroad companies grading parallel lines in order to maximize the land grants paid by the government. Nevertheless, the celebration to mark the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, in 1869 must be seen as one of the turning points of US history. In Chapters 6 and 7, the

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loans. The arrangement of channeling work through a construction company was, as we shall see in Chapter 6, which describes the building of the first transcontinental railroad, open to widespread abuse and corruption. The first American railroads were built largely by local people, with little or no experience of construction techniques. The

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the antipathy between the two sides, as the South was deeply suspicious of the big companies’ expansionist tendencies. In the 1850s, the idea of a transcontinental railroad had been discussed several times in Congress (see next chapter), but each time the legislation was blocked by the southern delegates, who were insisting on

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norm for funding railroad construction in the West. Thanks to energetic lobbying by the vested interests of southern congressmen, legislation for the building of a transcontinental railroad was repeatedly blocked in Congress during the 1850s. The election of Abraham Lincoln, as the first Republican president, in November 1860 made war inevitable. The

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the physical obstacles and huge distances involved, the dream of uniting the two oceans had become part of the American psyche. The idea of a transcontinental railroad was integral to the very notion of creating a unified nation across North America. The land was there, but, for the settlers to come, transportation

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would be impossible to open up the huge swath of land between the Mississippi and the West Coast. Several fanciful and impractical ideas for a transcontinental railroad had been put forward as early as the 1810s and 1820s, but the first detailed proposal emerged just as the first locomotives were chugging along

…

build the line would be to facilitate the export of furs to India. But then, to be fair, the notion of a three-thousand-mile transcontinental railroad at a time when there were barely a few dozen miles of line in the whole country could be conceived only by those with a

…

home in Wisconsin, then still a territory rather than a state. Rather presciently, Plumbe, best remembered as a pioneer of photographic techniques, argued that a transcontinental railroad “would hasten the formation of dense settlements throughout the whole extent of the road, advance the sales of the public lands, afford increased facilities to

…

shuttling between the West, where he surveyed the potential route, and the East, where he labored tirelessly to convince politicians of the need for the transcontinental railroad. As the bill was being prepared in 1862, he was back in Washington as the official representative of the Pacific Railroad Convention. Remarkably, despite the

…

and the West Coast, whereas other companies had to use tracks belonging to other railroads, which would invariably prioritize their own services. Meanwhile, two other transcontinental railroads had been built to the north. These were epic affairs, on a scale with the original transcontinental. The Northern Pacific was a completely separate enterprise

…

had obtained from Congress those generous arrangements for the financing of the Union Pacific, the lawmakers also granted a charter and land to a second transcontinental railroad, with a route from the shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota to the northern Pacific coast. Whereas the first transcontinental had been completed within five

…

a book on the trans continentals, suggests rightly that Americans appreciated their railroads despite their failings: “Nineteenth-century North Americans became quite aware of what transcontinental railroads failed to do, but initially they embraced them, as they embraced all railroads, as the epitome of modernity. They were in love with the railroads

…

. Dorothy R. Alder, British Investment in American Railways, 1834–1898 (University Press of Virginia, 1970), 83. 4. David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (Viking Penguin, 1999), 17. 5. Clifford Krainik, “National Vision, Local Enterprise: John Plumbe Jr. and the Advent of Photography in Washington, DC,” Washington History 9

…

, 175 and corruption, 128, 132–134, 144, 156–158 death toll, 142 and meeting of railways, 57, 150–152 and Native Americans, 147, 202 and transcontinental railroad, 128, 130, 131–158 workforce, 141–142, 143–144, 146, 150–152, 160 Central Railroad of Michigan, 49 Central Railroad of New Jersey, 213, 310

…

, 347 Chesterfield Railroad, 23 Chicago commuter services, 353 elevated railways, 279 jazz culture, 302 as rail hub, 68–72, 86–87 stockyards, 255, 302 and Transcontinental railroad, 153, 155 Tremont House Hotel, 182 Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroad, 335 Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (Burlington), 70, 168–169, 171–172, 199, 246–247, 305

…

, 38, 39, 40, 160 (see also Immigrants; Irish laborers) slave labor, 22, 25, 38, 39–40, 47, 91, 94–96, 102, 123, 163–164 and Transcontinental railroad, 139–149, 143–144, 146, 150–152 Labor unions, xxv, 231–238, 251, 262, 288, 322, 325–326, 329, 336 Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad

…

Lewis, Roger, 342 Lincoln, Abraham and Civil War, 96–100, 105, 106, 113, 122 funeral cortège, 183–184 and Rock Island incident, 86–87 and Transcontinental railroad, xxiii, 128, 130, 135, 138, 201 Lindbergh, Charles, 315 Little Schuylkill Navigation, Railroad, and Coal Company, 23 Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 16, 18, 59, 74 Loading

…

–287, 358 Grand Opera House, 244 health and public transport, 358 Penn Station, 260, 285, 358 railway electrification, 286–288 Staten Island ferry, 240 and Transcontinental railroad, 153 New York State, 30–31, 54–55, 59–60, 68, 192, 286–287, 330, 345 New York Sun, 157 New York Times, 167–168

…

–257, 272–274 Railway company agents, 169, 172 Railway construction, 25–50 costs, 46–48 labor, 38–40 promotion, 33–36, 37, 38 See also Transcontinental railroads Railway manias, 23, 85, 124, 163 Railway travel collective travel, 222–223 connections, 84 experiences, 73–85, 161–162, 167–168, 208–213 luxury and

…

, 80, 84, 264–265, 311 Trains magazine, 320, 344 Tramways (streetcars), 274–275, 278–279, 286, 330–332, 353–354 Transcontinental Air Transport, 302–303 Transcontinental railroads, 38, 54, 57, 86, 117, 175–180, 201, 215 and Central Pacific Railroad, 128, 130, 131–158 construction of first Transcontinental, xxiii, 124–158 (see

…

, 235, 250, 259 gas-engine trials, 310 and Hell on Wheels towns, 143 and meeting of railways, 57, 150–152 and Native Americans, 147 and Transcontinental railroad, 124, 128, 133–158, 175 workforce, 139–141, 150–152 United States Military Railroads, 98, 100, 114, 118, 122 United States Railroad Administration, 291 USS

How the World Ran Out of Everything

by Peter S. Goodman  · 11 Jun 2024  · 528pp  · 127,605 words

technological marvel that had the capacity to obliterate the traditional confines of geography. Asa Whitney, the New Yorker who first promoted the idea of a transcontinental railway, took inspiration from his first train trip in 1844, having just returned from China on an excruciating ocean voyage that consumed five months each way

…

Buffalo could take up to four days via the Erie Canal. The same trip by rail soon required only five hours. The construction of the transcontinental railway riveted the nation and the world, much like the excitement triggered a century later by humans setting foot on the moon. For workers, the rigors

…

the operations of the railroads as the construction boom unfolded in the middle of the nineteenth century. The company constructed the other half of the transcontinental railroad, running west from Iowa. The federal government was then encouraging companies to build out rail systems as a spur to commerce. It was handing out

…

, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America (New York: Mariner Books, 2020), chapter 1. 7. to move in troops: Sam Vong, “The Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad on Native Americans,” O Say Can You See? (blog), National Museum of American History, June 3, 2019. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/TRR. 8. Trains

…

carried farming equipment: American Experience, season 15, episode 7, “The Transcontinental Railroad,” aired January 27, 2003, on PBS. 9. “Time and space are annihilated”: David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First

…

Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 8–9. 10. 363-mile journey from Albany: Hiltzik, Iron Empires, chapter 1. 11. began recruiting Chinese: Gordon H. Chang,

…

Shelly Fisher Fishkin, and Hilton Obenzinger, introduction to The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, eds. Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). 12. more than twelve thousand: Bain, Empire Express, 209. 13. organized

…

. 20. “The explosion of railroad building”: Hiltzik, Iron Empires, chapter 1. 21. grants of land: Maury Klein, “Financing the Transcontinental Railroad,” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essays/financing-transcontinental-railroad. 22. Union Pacific: Hiltzik, Iron Empires, chapter 3. 23. comprehensive sprinkling of shares: Bain, Empire Express, 679–80. 24

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