Iron, Industry, and Injustice: The Race to Build America's First Transcontinental Railroad

The Dive

By 1869, the idea of a transcontinental railroad had been circling for decades. But it took a civil war—and a Congress no longer split between North and South—to finally move it forward. In 1862, the Pacific Railroad Act granted land and loans to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, launching one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in American history.

From Omaha and Sacramento, workers began laying tracks toward each other across 1,776 miles of wild terrain. Irish immigrants, Civil War veterans, and freedmen worked the Union Pacific lines, while thousands of Chinese laborers took on the treacherous Sierra Nevada for the Central Pacific. Avalanches, dynamite accidents, heatwaves, and exploitation were routine. Chinese workers were paid less and given the most dangerous jobs—but without them, the railroad would not have been completed.

On May 10, 1869, the two lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah. Railroad barons gathered in suits and top hats to drive a ceremonial golden spike into the final tie—telegraph wires wrapped around the hammer transmitted the blows in real time across the country. In San Francisco and New York, cannon blasts marked the moment. For the first time, America was physically united from coast to coast.

The railroad transformed trade. What once took six months by wagon could now be done in six days. Crops, cattle, tea, textiles—goods surged back and forth, and industries boomed. But with this growth came upheaval. Native American lands were carved up and sold off. The railroad brought buffalo hunters who decimated herds Indigenous communities depended on. Entire nations were pushed onto reservations or wiped out altogether.

The transcontinental line also introduced the idea of standardized time zones, made possible catalog shopping, and seeded hundreds of new towns. It redefined the American landscape—and who had power within it.

But it was also an early case study in corporate manipulation. The railroad’s backers—Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker—pioneered government-financed capitalism, taking public subsidies while dodging accountability. And once the tracks were laid, the laborers who built them were discarded and often excluded from the prosperity they made possible.

Despite its human costs, the transcontinental railroad remains one of the most transformative feats in U.S. history. It changed how Americans moved, traded, and thought about space itself. And it laid the literal and metaphorical tracks for the next era of empire, industrialization, and American ambition.

Why It Matters

This wasn’t just a train—it was a transformation. The transcontinental railroad redefined travel, work, and what it meant to be American. But it also reminds us that progress often rides on the backs of the powerless. To understand the modern U.S., you have to understand what was built, who built it—and who paid the price.