The impact of the railroad on the geographic, economic, and political futures of the United States was enormous, not just because of the sheer physicality of the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad connecting the entire continent east to west in 1869.
This massive amount of construction was only a tiny piece of the large and varied impact of rail travel on the development of the United States, beginning some 30 years earlier.
Rail History in the United States The first railroads in America were horse-drawn, but with the development of the steam engine, railroads became a viable enterprise. The era of railroad building began in 1830 when Peter Cooper's locomotive called the Tom Thumb was put into service and traveled 13 miles along what would become the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line. Over 1,200 miles of railroad track were laid between 1832 and 1837. And, in the 1860s, the construction of the Transcontinental Railway brought the two coasts closer together.
The impact of railroad traffic was no less than a revolution of communication for the new territories of the rapidly expanding United States.
Answer:The transcontinential railroad was a negative effect for the Native Americans because it destroyed their land and homes. The bulding of the Transcontinential railroad was a negative effect because to build the Railroad that also means that the buffalo that was everywhere had to be killed off.
