How did the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad change the lives of Americans citizens?

Background Essay on Building the Railroads

This essay explains how railroads transformed late-nineteenth century America and shows how their impact was felt differently across class and racial lines.

The railroad, a symbol of both progress and peril, spurred rapid and far-reaching changes in late nineteenth century American society. Supported by government funds, railroad building boomed after the Civil War. There were only 2,000 miles of track in 1850; by 1877 there were nearly 80,000 miles in use. Crossing the wilderness, carrying people and freight at unheard-of speeds, the railroads changed the ways Americans thought and lived. As distant cities and towns were linked together, Americans increasingly identified themselves as citizens of a whole nation, not merely a single state. For the first time, people in different parts of the country could read the same news and buy the same products. Such basic concepts as time and distance took on new meanings—in 1883, the railroads forced America to adopt its first national time zones. The railroads accelerated the pace of the Industrial Revolution. New technologies, such as machine building and iron and steel production, advanced to meet the demands of railroad growth. By providing cheaper and faster freight delivery, the railroads helped create a new national market.

While the completion of the transcontinental railroad paved the way for exponential growth in the population and economy of the West and the nation, it also caused significant harm to many people. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Over the next twenty years, railroads carried farmers and ranchers who settled on the Great Plains, soldiers who fought Indians wars, and hunters who killed buffalo for sport and profit. The farmers, ranchers, soldiers, and buffalo hunters, together with businessmen who came to develop the West's mineral and lumber resources, spelled destruction for the Great Plains Indians and their way of life. Working men and women were crucial to the growth of the railroads and the new industrial system, but they shared in few of its rewards. Railway workers labored an average of 12 hours a day, six days a week. Sometimes they worked 16 to 20 hours without a rest. Their average wage was $2.50 a day. Railroad work was difficult and dangerous, and in 1877 a nationwide rebellion of railroad workers brought the United States to a standstill. Eighty thousand railroad workers walked out, joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans outraged by the excesses of the railroad companies and the misery of a four-year economic depression. Police, state militia, and federal troops clashed with strikers and sympathizers, leaving more than one hundred dead and thousands injured. 

Creator | American Social History Project
Rights | Copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Item Type | Article/Essay
Cite This document | American Social History Project, “Background Essay on Building the Railroads,” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, accessed September 4, 2022, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/2361.

Frank Beard. "Does not such a meeting make amends?" . May 29, 1869. Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division..

By connecting the existing eastern U.S. rail networks to the west coast, the Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad") became the first continuous railroad line across the United States. It was constructed between 1863 and 1869.

The idea of a railroad that went from the east coast to the west didn’t start when building began. It is a story made up of a series of events and filled with a cast of people and companies that made it happen—here are just a few of note:

• One of the early and most prominent people making the case for a transcontinental railroad was Asa Whitney. In 1849 he published his ideas on the idea of a railroad that began in Chicago and went to California. There were many others who also joined the chorus.
• In 1852 Theodore Judah was the chief engineer for the newly formed Sacramento Valley Railroad. He undertook a survey to find a manageable route through the high and rugged Sierra Nevada and in 1856 presented his plan to Congress.
• Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 on July 1, 1862, and the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) and the Union Pacific Railroad were authorized by Congress.

The rail line, also called the Great Transcontinental Railroad and later the "Overland Route," was predominantly built by the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California (CPRR) and Union Pacific (with some contribution by the Western Pacific Railroad Company) over public lands provided by extensive US land grants.

The railroad opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869, when CPRR President Leland Stanford ceremonially drove the gold "Last Spike" (later often referred to as the "Golden Spike") at Promontory Summit in Utah.

But the story of the railroads in the United States, and these two companies in particular, was really just getting started. The original Union Pacific, entangled in the Crédit Mobilier scandal and hit hard by the financial crisis of 1873, was eventually taken over by the new Union Pacific Railway in 1880 with its major stockholder being Jay Gould. It continued on, eventually becoming Union Pacific Railway. Central Pacific also went through changes including consolidation with the Western Pacific Railroad and the San Francisco Bay Railroad Co. under the name "Central Pacific Railroad Co." In 1885 it was leased to Southern Pacific and three years later the ICC listed it as non-operating. In 1899 it was reorganized as Central Pacific Railway and in 1959 it merged into Southern Pacific.

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