The Transcontinental Railroad: A History from Beginning to End

In the 1850s, the United States was a nation divided. In the North, industrialization and urbanization were both significant drivers of change. In the South, a largely agrarian economy was supported by the institution of slavery. The East and West of the country were also divided, not by social or political differences but by a vast tract of largely untouched, rugged, and often hostile territory. There were just two ways to travel from the East Coast to the Pacific Coast or vice versa. A journey by stagecoach or wagon train could take anything from three to six months and was fraught with potential hazards. The alternative was a trip by ship via Cape Horn, which could take two months or more. For Americans living on the East Coast, it was faster, cheaper, and safer to travel to Europe than to the Pacific Coast of their own country.

If America was to prosper and continue to grow, it had to become a single nation—territorially, politically, and culturally. The differences between the Northern and Southern states were at least partly solved by a Northern victory in the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 that left over one million dead. Forging a reliable link between East and West would take not a war but the completion of one of the most ambitious and challenging engineering feats of the nineteenth century: the building of a 2,000-mile transcontinental railroad.