Transcontinental railroad

The Transcontinental Railroad was a technological achievement that cut the trip from the East to the West from six months to one week. Not only did it help communication between the states, it facilitated trade, specifically Western raw goods and Eastern manufactured goods (Quinn). Even though the country needed a railroad to link the two sides and allow for communication, its effects changed the way that North America functioned, through the destruction of the ecosystems that had been in place…

Emergence and expansion of Railway The rapid expansion of Railways was the most important infrastructure development in India during the British Raj. Starting in 16 April 1853, when the first railway passenger train started its operations, Indian railway system expanded to become, the fourth largest in the world by 1910. The pioneer of railway expansion in India was Governor-General Lord Dalhousie who formulated the plan to build a network of trunk lines connecting the major regions of…

I start my trip from the location of frenzied outfitting activity throughout the 1840s and early 1850s, Independence (Missouri) was the jumping-off point for the Santa Fe and Oregon trails. The town includes several historic buildings, monuments and Independence Spring. As the place of convergence of early routes from the Mississippi Valley, this square was the last significant point of supply until the mid-1840s, when Westport also became an outfitting town. When I visited Independence in 1846,…

The First Transcontinental Railroad was built crossing the western side of America and finished around 1869. The idea of creating the line was present in the States long before the construction was approved. This was the era of the Civil War and the southerners who were opposed to the idea before were now gone from congress, so that meant the republicans could use that opportunity to vote for the construction of the transcontinental railroad. They chose two companies, the Union Pacific and…

for agriculture. Mining, a new money maker, first started there. The two industries drew people to work either in them, or in the towns where these workers resided. However, all this wouldn’t have been possible without the recently developed railroads. Railroads could transport product and people in a fraction of the time old wagon trains could. This new technology was what really made western expansion possible. It wasn’t all flawless though. Indians were forced to move and assimilate as the…

The government had a huge role in the westward expansion that greatly consisted land given to those willing to make the journey to get to the west. Starting in the 1820s through the 1860s, Americans began to move westward to the Mississippi River. The government was pushing the Native Americans out which made a great impact on the Native people who were living around the area. The government promised a better live style for the ones that wanted to move. As they were being pushed west, the…

THE HISTORY OF THE ALCAN HIGHWAY The idea of laying a roadway to connect the United States with the North American continent’s ‘far north’ can be traced all the way back to the Yukon gold rushes of the 1890’s. It wasn’t till about the 1930’s that they started putting the idea into effect. The Alaska territorial legislature commission worked out different possibilities and routes. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to finally get the work started which is kind of unfortunate. When…

Western Railway originally connected Petersburg, Virginia with City Point (now-called Hopewell), Virginia and was called the City Point Railroad. It and other railways companies combined in 1870 to become the Atlantic, Mississippi, and Ohio Railroad. In 1881, the company acquired the Scioto Valley Railroad in Ohio and changed its name to the Norfolk and Western Railroad.…

from 1865 to 1900 including; free land for western settlers, having a railroad to connect the east with the west, and the economy, which brought a lot of immigrants over in search of work. Free land was offered to western settlers through an act that passed called The Homestead Act. The settlement of the Western frontier brought people from different racial backgrounds in hopes of free land and to work on the railroad. The railroad would span from the west to the east, linking the two, sparking…

The Santa Fe Trail was an 800 mile Trail from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe, in New Mexico. The travel along this trail began in 1821 and continued until 1860 where the railroad took over control of the trade; under the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. It traversed what was called the Great American Desert. This was named as such because of the expanse of dry, arid terrain viewed as inhospitable to the nineteenth century contemporaries, and unsuitable for settlement and expansion.…