Transcontinental Railroad

1. The Transcontinental Railroad

2. The Gilded Age
and Industrialization

3. The Gilded Age
• The word gilded means covered with
gold, but it also means that the inside is
not gold.
• The Gilded Age was the time from the
end of the Civil War (1861-65) through the
beginning of the twentieth century.

4. The Gilded Age
• Great things were beginning to happen in
the United States:
– More railroads
– New factories
– New inventions
– More immigrants
– Discovery of new mines
– New farms and ranches in the Great Plains
• But the Gilded Age had a dark side. Not everyone
benefited from the country’s growth in technology,
industry, and population.

6. Industrial Revolution
• During the Industrial Revolution,
machines started to replace hand tools,
and factories began to replace craft shops.
• After the Civil War, even greater changes
took place in American industry.
• Inventors developed new technologies,
and business owners found new ways to
run their businesses.

7. Free Enterprise
• The free enterprise system in the United
States grew by leaps and bounds!
• Free enterprise is an economic system in
which businesses have the freedom to
offer for sale many kinds of goods and
services.

8. The Transcontinental Railroad
By 1829, Englishman George Stephenson’s Rocket had shown
that a steam-propelled locomotive could provide reliable, high-
volume transportation at a low enough cost to make it
economically feasible for people and products.
The first steam-locomotive build for regular duty in the United
States went into service in Charleston in 1830.
Thirty years later, a spider web of thirty thousand miles of track
crisscrossed the East clear to the Mississippi and in some rare
cases beyond it.
The Chicago and Rock Island railroad, which had linked Chicago
to the Mississippi in 1854, was the first to build a rail bridge
across the river.

9. Transcontinental Railroad

10. The Transcontinental Railroad
Getting the two rail lines to Promontory
Summit had involved $ 200 millions.
Thousands of men had worked in
sometimes deplorable conditions across a
perilous landscape, and more than one
hundred of them had perished in the effort.

11. Expanding Rail Transportation
• Even when Abraham Lincoln was
President, plans were being made to
connect railways that would allow one to
travel from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific
coast.
• Railroads had been built from the Atlantic
coast to Nebraska.
• Now, the goal was to connect a railway
from Nebraska to the Pacific coast.

12. Two Railroad Companies
• In 1862, Congress gave two companies
the right to build the railroad.
• The government also gave them the land
and loaned them money.
• The Union Pacific Railroad built west
from Omaha, Nebraska.
• The Central Pacific Railroad built east
from Sacramento, California.

13. The Union Pacific Railroad
The Central Pacific Railroad

14. Building the Railroad
• The majority of the Union Pacific track was built
by Irish laborers, veterans of both the Union and
Confederate armies, and Mormons who wished
to see the railroad pass through Ogden, Utah.
• Chinese workers built most of the Central
Pacific track. 12000 workers from China were
brought for the work.
• Most of the men received between one and
three dollars per day, but the workers from China
received much less. Eventually, they went on
strike and gained a small increase in salary.

20. The Railroads Meet
• On May 10, 1869, the
two railroads met at
Promontory, Utah.
• A golden spike with a
prayer written on it
was used to complete
the first
transcontinental
railroad.