Question

When the Transcontinental Railroad was being built. Why was it a race to lay the most track?

Answer 1

Central Pacific Chief Engineer Theodore Judah already had surveyed the railroad’s route through the Sierra Nevada in May 1863, and just five months later the busy railroad spiked the first rail. Relying on equipment from the eastern United States, Central Pacific’s supply line stretched around the tip of Cape Horn, often taking seven months to reach San Francisco. Just 30 miles from Sacramento, Central Pacific created the first of many massive cuts — Bloomer Cut is 800 feet long and 63 feet deep! Steep winter snows and thick granite plagued the railroad, which often counted progress in inches or feet rather than miles. Central Pacific constructed 15 tunnels through the Sierras; the longest, at Donner Summit, stretched 1,659 feet through pure granite. By spring 1869, Central Pacific had made it through the mountains and onto the relatively flat land of western Utah, constructing 690 miles of track through some of the most difficult terrain ever encountered by a railroad.

The Union Pacific did not win the race into Utah without enormous costs - in money, materials, and lives. As in war, the longer the contest continued, the more ruthless the leaders of the competing railroads became toward their common laborers.

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