Transcontinental Railroad Dbq Research Paper

Where would our world be today if the Transcontinental Railroad simply didn’t exist? The Railroad impacted us in many ways, but I believe that we were impacted most economically. The Transcontinental Railroad impacted the United States Economically because, it transformed towns to boosting economic hotspots, lowered the general cost for shipping across hefty distances, and increased revenue from exports and imports dramatically. The railroad transformed towns like Lovelock, Nevada into economic hotspots. Lovelock Nevada was a normal town until the late 1800s when the Chinese started building the Railroad through this town. The population soon boosted bringing in hundreds of people. More and more people means more money being made for the economy. Lovelock quickly became a hotspot for mining, agriculture, and retail which brought in lots of revenue. (Document A). Clearly a transformation like this would mean that the economy surely benefited tremendously. The building of the railroad dropped the general cost of shipping domestically as well as nationally. In the 1860’s to ship by wagon it cost 5 times more than it would by rail. With the price difference, and the fact with shipping by wagon it would remarkably take much longer, shipping by rail became the most efficient solution. …show more content…
According to a research report on the number in tons of exports and imports in 2014 there was a plethora of exports being made possible because of the transcontinental railroad. Leading exports were coal with 100 million tons in exports, farm and food with 64 million tons, and Intermodal with 64 million tons as well. It’s the same story with imports with Intermodal, Forest products, and Chemicals and petroleum being shipped in by millions of tons at a time.(Document F) If we didn’t have the funds coming in from these exports and imports I can surely say that our economy would be quite