In just a few decades, trains had become enshrined in American culture as symbols of both progress and greed, leisure and labor, liberation and disaster. By the 1920s, around two million people worked in some fashion for the railroads, making it one of the country’s largest employers. Barely twenty years later, with Native communities dispossessed of much of their ancestral lands, about 100,000 more miles of track marbled the nation. Constructed between 18, the Transcontinental Railroad was at the time the largest and most expensive infrastructure project undertaken by the country-and its impact was enormous. The extension of rail service across the continent enabled growth of the United States as a nation through the transport of goods, materials, and people. The building of the railroad is an iconic American tale about physical mobility and technical prowess, but it’s also a story about labor, migration, American conquest, and empire.
There are many experiences-achievements and consequences-that hinge off this giant physical undertaking to “unite” the country and continent. This 1,700-mile stretch of continuous track from the Central Pacific terminus in Sacramento, California, to the Union Pacific terminus in Omaha, Nebraska, connected the West Coast to the existing network of eastern railways.
on May 10, 1869, the United States’ first Transcontinental Railroad was completed as the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines were ceremoniously joined on Promontory Summit, Utah.