First Transcontinental Railroad

Transportation in and around America has been ruined for years and with luck transportation planners will change the face of American transportation. In the 1860s the United States government approved the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, which became the first mass transit system in America and revolutionized the way Americans lived, transporting people, livestock as well as other cargo across America. Transportation is important to our society, how it changes the way we travel,…

The Transcontinental Railroad, first built in 1829, had a seemingly simple purpose. It provided jobs for over 200,000 people and allowed easy access to expansion westward. Looking at the construction of the railroad through the lense of ‘Manifest Destiny’, the Transcontinental Railroad was a great enterprise into maximizing profits. The negatives of the railroad however, outweigh the supposedly beneficial factors. The Transcontinental Railroad is detrimental to the American society and causes…

The transcontinental railroad was a very important build in U.S. history that helped smoothly connect the states together, to give people an easier and safer way to travel and ship goods from place to place. The West had very few lines and had none connecting to the east. So when the California Gold Rush hit and they had no good way of getting out to the West people decided it was about time they get one. Sadly there was one big problem. That problem being the unforgiving terrain the line would…

expansion. Those four are: population growth, transportation improvements, money and the slave state/free state. This was the time frame that railroads took boom. The Transcontinental Railway was the biggest railway project. The congress authorized the Pacific Railway Act which funded a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. Now the railroad attracted some of the more sleazy financial geniuses. Thomas Durant was one of the more sleazier investors. He got the US government to…

From 1840 to 1860 the total trackage length in the US increase more than nine times. Railroads in the mid 1800s were booming across America, following them was many radical changes. One of the first evident changes was one of independence; train lines diverted traffic from water ways, this in turn made the West in addition to the South more independent from their Northeastern counterparts. Rail lines were important for expansion across the nation, thousands of people used them to move Westward.…

idea in a new country The history of railroads in United States is almost as old as the nation itself. Beginning in the early 1800s, this incredible country of ours prospered into one of the most profitable superpowers in the world and continues to be today. Such prosperity would have been out of reach if it were not for the railroad system. In 1812, Colonel John Stevens first pitched the idea of building a railroad system in the United States. The first railroads ever built included a system…

In the first section of this paper I will briefly examine some of the characteristics of what is described as the Gilded Age in America, the period immediately following the Civil War, the phrase being derived from Twain and Dudley’s novel The Gilded Age. One of the landmark achievements of this period, around which much of the novel also revolves, is the completion of the first transcontinental railway network in the year 1869. Predicated upon this, to a large extent, is the process of…

Have you ever wondered why the Transcontinental Railroad was built, how it was made, or who made it? Well before the Transcontinental Railroad was built the first steam locomotive was built in 1930 and in 1950 over 9,000 miles of track was built connecting cities, states, important landforms, and more. That set the early stages for the next couple of decades for more and more miles of track to be laid. In 1849 lots of settlers were traveling long distances over mountains, hills forests, rivers…

In the year of 1861, in the midst of America’s Civil War, Congress authorized one of the most ambitious projects that the country had ever envisioned: the construction of a transcontinental railroad. At one end of this immensely long railroad system which was planned to be over 1,700 miles long __ was the Central Pacific Railroad which stretched across the lands of California, the harsh granite walls of the Sierra Nevada and onwards to connect with the Union Pacific in Utah. Through my research…

The Transcontinental Railroad, when completed, was 1776 miles long, stretching the expanse of the newly formed USA. The two sides of the rails were united in 1869 in Promontory, utah, by a golden spike truck into the ground by Leland Stanford. The TRR shaped the united states by uniting the sections of the east, west, north, and south. The social impact was enormous, by encouraging immigration to distant places in the newly settled west. Sadly, there were also negative effects of the uniting,…