The Transcontinental Railroad

On a cold day in December of eighteen sixty-three, construction began on a railroad that would change the United States more thoroughly than any other engineering project of the century. The Union Pacific Railroad, authorized by Congress to build westward from the Missouri River, broke ground in Omaha, Nebraska. The other end would be built by the Central Pacific, working east from Sacramento. They would join six years later in Utah.

Omaha was chosen as the eastern terminus because it sat at the head of the Platte River valley, the natural corridor that westward emigrants had been following for two decades. The valley offered a nearly level grade for five hundred miles, the best natural railroad routing across the Great Plains. General Grenville Dodge, who had surveyed railroad routes across the plains before the Civil War, directed the engineering.

The construction workforce was roughly ten thousand men at its peak across the whole project, with a large proportion of Irish immigrants laying track in the Nebraska section. They crossed the plains quickly. The flat terrain allowed workers to lay up to a mile of track per day in favorable conditions. The challenges came later, in the mountains of Wyoming and Nevada.

The two lines met on May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, at Promontory Summit, Utah. Omaha became the eastern anchor of the continent's first transcontinental rail link. Nebraska, which emigrants had spent months crossing by wagon, could now be crossed by train in a day. The world had contracted, and Nebraska was the beginning of that contraction.