Next to winning Civil War and abolishing slavery, transcontinental railroad the greatest American achievement in 19th century

Needed democratic political system, skilled engineers, free labor and soldiers honed from Civil War, trees and iron, risk-taking capitalists, teamwork

Many workers former soldiers who didn’t want to go home after Appomattox

Workers: “They could not have done it alone, but it could not have been done without them.”

Thomas Curtis Clarke, 1889: “The world of to-day differs from that of Napoleon more than his world differed from that of Julius Caesar; and this change has chiefly been made by railways.”

“Poetry of engineering” required both “imagination to conceive and skill to execute.”

Lincoln an early proponent of railroads in 1830s; defended them in court over taxes and regulations

Illinois Central largest line in the world in 1850s

Rock Island bridge over Mississippi first for railroads

George Washington could travel no faster than Julius Caesar, but Andrew Jackson could go upstream at a fair pace, and James Polk could travel at 20 miles an hour or more overland

1862 Pacific Railroad Act chartered Union Pacific Railroad, first corporation chartered by the federal government since the Second Bank in 1816

Brigham Young was the Union Pacific’s first and longtime only stock buyer in good standing for paying in full

Chinese workers paid a decent wage and recruited: good work ethic, clean, disciplined, quick learners, cheap labor

Golden Spike joined east and west as Appomattox had North and South four years earlier

Americans of the second half of nineteenth century saw greatest change: slavery abolished, electricity, telephone, telegraph, railroad

Drilling of Golden Spike sent telegraph message instantaneously, the first simultaneous shared event in history

Reporter compared Golden Spike to first shot at Lexington