Take a Ride on This Transcontinental Railroad Quiz

The Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads came together at Promontory Summit in Utah to form the first transcontinental railroad. To commemorate this event, the Utah state quarter depicts two trains meeting in the middle. Between the two locomotives is the ceremonial golden spike, the symbol of the railroad’s completion.

At the ceremony celebrating the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Central Pacific Railroad president Leland Stanford arrived aboard a steam-powered locomotive called Jupiter. This made Jupiter the first passenger train to travel from west to east on the transcontinental railroad. It was met in Promontory by Union Pacific locomotive No. 119. After the ceremony, Jupiter operated for a few decades before it was decommissioned.

From Omaha to Sacramento, the transcontinental railroad stretched approximately 1,776 miles. Of those, 690 were laid by the Central Pacific Railroad, and 1,086 miles were laid by the Union Pacific Railroad. The two companies connected their rail lines in Utah to complete the project.

During construction of the transcontinental railroad, laborers lived in makeshift settlements that could be easily packed up and moved to follow the railroad’s progress. These portable settlements were referred to as “Hell on Wheels” towns. The term survives today, though in many different modern contexts.

The 1924 silent film “The Iron Horse” was the first feature film by legendary director John Ford. It revolves around the workers who built the railroad and a villainous businessman trying to thwart their efforts. The film takes many liberties with historical facts, but is now considered an important work in both Ford’s career and the Western genre as a whole.

One of the most challenging aspects of the railroad’s construction was clearing a path through the Sierra Nevada. Up to 12,000 workers, mostly Chinese laborers, worked through the grueling winter of 1866-67 to drill, blast, and dig through the mountains to create the route. The final passage was more than 1,500 feet long, at an elevation of 7,000 feet.

The large influx of Chinese immigrants to the western United States in the mid-19th century was in part driven by civil unrest in China caused by the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and early ’60s. During this conflict between Chinese peasants and the country’s rulers, more than 20 million people were killed. The violence and turmoil drove many Chinese people to seek new lives in different countries, including the United States.

After a fatal tunnel explosion, Chinese railroad workers organized a strike, refusing to return to work until their demands for increased wages and safer working conditions were met. The strike was eventually broken when the railroad companies cut off their provisions and threatened violence, but it remains an important moment in the Asian American fight for equality in the United States.

Leland Stanford, an industrialist and politician who also founded Stanford University, was the president of the Central Pacific Railroad Company when the transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869. As such, Stanford presided over the ceremony commemorating the completion of the railroad, and signaled the end of the construction process by tapping the golden “last spike” into the ground.

Portions of the transcontinental railroad ran straight through mountain passes, and workers often had to drill through thousands of feet of solid rock to clear a path for the railroad’s progress. To help them with this task, they used the recently invented explosive nitroglycerin to blast through the rock more quickly.

Over 21,000 migrant workers labored to construct the transcontinental railroad. A significant portion of these laborers were emigrants from China, but the workforce also included formerly enslaved African Americans, Civil War veterans, members of the Mormon church, and many others who came together to complete one of the largest and most demanding engineering projects in U.S. history.

The completion of the first transcontinental railroad was celebrated in an official ceremony at the site where the Central Pacific and Union Pacific rail lines met in Utah. There, on May 10, 1869, a golden railroad spike was driven into the ground to symbolize the new connection that now existed between the eastern and western United States.

Abraham Lincoln had long advocated for a transcontinental railroad, and in 1862, he signed the Pacific Railway Act to help make this vision a reality. The new law authorized the government to provide special subsidies and financial support to railroad companies undertaking the project of building a transcontinental railroad, and also set aside government land for those companies to build on.

The United States’ first transcontinental railroad was constructed in the 1860s, with an eastern terminus in Omaha, Nebraska, and a western terminus in Sacramento, California. The western half of the railroad was constructed by the Central Pacific Railroad, while the eastern part was constructed by the Union Pacific Railroad. The two railroads connected in Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, making cross-country train travel in the U.S. possible for the first time.