50 Fun Facts About Transcontinental Railroad

Which canal opened in 1869, the same year as the transcontinental railroad?

Suez. The canal opened in Egypt that November, six months after the rails met, and took the trade between Asia and Europe that the railroad's promoters had hoped to draw across America.

At which Utah Territory location did the Central Pacific and Union Pacific meet in 1869?

Promontory Summit. Reporters in 1869 called it Promontory Point, a spot some 35 miles to the south, and the wrong name has been repeated in textbooks and films ever since.

Who ceremonially drove the golden Last Spike?

Leland Stanford. He only tapped the gold spike into a drilled hole; when he swung at the iron one wired to the telegraph he is said to have hit the tie instead.

As Secretary of War in the 1850s, which future Confederate leader oversaw the Army's surveys for a Pacific railroad?

Jefferson Davis. He favored a line across the southern territories, and a central route could be voted through only after the Southern states had left Congress.

What one-word telegraph message announced the line's completion?

DONE. The spike and hammer were wired to the telegraph so the whole country could hear the blows, but the swing is said to have missed, leaving the operator to tap the strokes out by hand before sending the word.

From which California city did the Central Pacific start building east in 1863?

Sacramento. Its rails, tools and locomotives all came by sea from the East Coast and then upriver by steamer, because the factories that made them were on the other side of the continent.

Which Central Pacific locomotive took part in the Last Spike ceremony?

Jupiter. It was a stand-in: the engine first chosen to pull the company president's train was damaged on the way by a log that workmen had rolled onto the track, and Jupiter was coupled on instead.

Why did Union Pacific boss Thomas Durant arrive two days late for the last-spike ceremony?

Unpaid workers held his train. Hundreds of tie cutters owed three months' wages chained his car to a siding in Wyoming until their money arrived, which helped push the ceremony from May 8 to May 10.

What did thousands of Chinese workers on the Central Pacific do for a week in June 1867?

Went on strike. They stopped work along 30 miles of the mountain line, asking for more pay and shorter shifts, until the company cut off their food and supplies.

By what nickname were the Central Pacific's Chinese workers commonly known at the time?

Celestials. Whatever the newspapers called them, the company came to prefer them: within three years they were the great majority of its workforce and it was advertising for more in China.

Which of the Central Pacific's Big Four pushed to hire Chinese crews over his foreman's objections?

Charles Crocker. When his construction boss doubted that Chinese masons could do the work, he asked whether they had not built the biggest piece of masonry in the world, the Great Wall.

What happened to the golden spike as soon as the last-spike ceremony was over?

Pulled out and replaced. The gold spike and its polished tie were lifted straight away in favor of plain pine and iron, and the spike went home to California with the man who had paid for it.

Which engineer surveyed the Sierra route and lobbied Congress for the railroad?

Theodore Judah. He talked of so little else that people called him Pacific Railroad crazy, yet the line was built over the very route he mapped across the mountains.

What disease killed the Central Pacific's original chief engineer in 1863?

Yellow fever. He caught it crossing Panama on his way to New York, where he hoped to find investors to buy out his partners, and died a week after landing.

Union Pacific boss Thomas Durant built his stake during the Civil War by smuggling which contraband crop?

Cotton. Trained as a doctor, he had given up medicine for business, and he ran the Union Pacific from the vice presidency while a respectable figurehead held the top title.

Which Union general served as Union Pacific's chief engineer during construction?

Grenville Dodge. Escaping a war party in 1865, he followed an unbroken ridge down to the plains and realized he had found the way his railroad could cross the Laramie range.

Which scandal over inflated construction contracts ensnared Union Pacific figures?

Crédit Mobilier. Union Pacific insiders owned the construction company, so they could bill their own railroad about double the going rate for track and keep the difference.

Into which larger rail system was the Central Pacific absorbed in 1885?

Southern Pacific. More than a century later, in 1996, that company was itself bought by the Union Pacific, so the two rivals of 1869 ended up as one railroad.

Land grants to the railroads were laid out in what pattern?

Checkerboard. The railroads were given the odd-numbered square-mile sections to sell for capital, and the government held on to the even-numbered ones in between.

Which land deal did the United States make largely to secure a southern route for a Pacific railroad?

The Gadsden Purchase. The $10 million strip bought from Mexico is now the bottom of Arizona and New Mexico, but secession sent the first railroad along a central route instead.

What did North America's railroads introduce on November 18, 1883?

Standard time zones. Until then most towns kept their own local time by the sun; the railroad companies made the switch themselves, and Congress did not write their zones into law until 1918.

The Central Pacific crossed the Sierra over which pass?

Donner. The pass, named for the emigrant party trapped below it in 1846, offered one long steady climb where most of the range would have forced the railroad up two separate ridges.

The 1904 Lucin Cutoff took trains off the original golden-spike route by running straight across what?

The Great Salt Lake. A twelve-mile timber trestle carried the rails over the water, and the old line around the north shore dwindled into a branch serving local ranches.

Which explosive did the Central Pacific manufacture on site to speed work on its Summit Tunnel?

Nitroglycerin. State rules barred shipping it, so a chemist mixed it fresh beside the tunnel each day, and the daily advance through the granite rose by about half.

What did the Central Pacific build over 37 miles of its Sierra track?

Timber snow sheds. Plows and shovel gangs could not keep the mountain line clear, so the company spent three years roofing the track in heavy timber.

How much track did the Central Pacific lay in its record day of April 1869?

10 miles. Eight rail handlers and an army of Chinese tracklayers put down 10 miles and 56 feet between dawn and dusk, a stunt staged to outdo the Union Pacific and, it is said, to win a bet.

What were the mobile tent towns that followed the Union Pacific railhead nicknamed?

Hell on Wheels. A Massachusetts newspaper editor put the name in print after watching the gamblers and saloon keepers pack up their shacks and follow the railhead west.

Which river valley did the Union Pacific follow west across Nebraska?

Platte. The emigrant wagon trails had followed the same broad, gently rising valley, and on it the tracklayers were soon putting down a mile or more of rail a day.

Which Wyoming town did the Union Pacific found in 1867 and build into one of its main railroad centers?

Cheyenne. The railroad's chief engineer picked the site on July 4, 1867, and by the end of that year thousands of people were living there.

Which religious leader contracted to supply grading crews to the Union Pacific?

Brigham Young. He signed with the Central Pacific as well, so his church's crews were grading for both rivals while the two lines raced past each other across Utah.

Much of which region's railroads ran on a five-foot gauge that did not match the transcontinental line?

The South. Its lines stayed out of step until 1886, when more than 11,000 miles of Southern track were narrowed to match the rest of the country in two days.

Before a bridge opened in 1872, how did Union Pacific trains cross the Missouri at Omaha?

By ferry. For three years after the golden spike the coast-to-coast line still had a gap at the river, and the company's own 1871 report called the missing bridge one of the most annoying incidents of the trip to California.

By what name did the completed transcontinental line later become popularly known?

Overland Route. The word had belonged to the stagecoach lines that crossed the West before the rails, and from 1887 the Union Pacific ran a train under it too, the Overland Flyer, later the Overland Limited.

According to its engraving, the golden spike marks a railroad that unites which two things?

The two great oceans. One side reads: "May God continue the unity of our Country as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world," a pointed wish only four years after the Civil War.

Which immigrant group supplied most of the Union Pacific's tracklayers?

Irish. The Civil War had just ended when the Union Pacific began to build, so hiring was easy, and most of the veterans and laborers who signed on were Irishmen.

The polished laurel tie from the last-spike ceremony survived until which disaster destroyed it?

San Francisco earthquake. The tie burned in the fires that followed; it had come to the ceremony with four holes already drilled, because a spike of soft gold could never be hammered in.

Which state supplied a silver spike for the 1869 last-spike ceremony?

Nevada. The Comstock Lode had made it the silver state, and its spike was forged by a blacksmith from Virginia City silver only days before the ceremony and handed over rough and unpolished.

What became of the two locomotives that met nose to nose at the 1869 ceremony?

They were sold for scrap. Each fetched about $1,000 in the early 1900s, and the pair kept in steam at the site are replicas, finished in 1979 and worked up from old photographs.

In the most famous photograph of the 1869 meeting of the rails, what are the two chief engineers doing?

Shaking hands. Andrew Russell took the picture after the railroad bosses had gone back to their cars, and it is also called the champagne photo for the bottles held out between the two engines.

Long bypassed by a shortcut, why were the rails at the 1869 meeting point finally torn up?

The war effort. In 1942 the rails were lifted for reuse at military depots, and the job began with a ceremonial "undriving" of the last spike.

Which Jules Verne novel was partly inspired by America's new transcontinental railroad?

Around the World in Eighty Days. Its hero Phileas Fogg crosses America on the new line, where his train has to survive a failing bridge and an ambush.

Which 1924 John Ford silent film dramatized the building of the railroad?

The Iron Horse. Ford's company spent a freezing desert winter housed in unheated circus sleeping cars, and took to wearing the film's costumes off camera to keep warm.

Which rail baron gained control of Union Pacific after the Panic of 1873?

Jay Gould. With the stock knocked down by the panic he bought his way into control, and within a decade he had left the company again with a large profit.

Which president signed the first Pacific Railroad Act and named Council Bluffs, Iowa, as the line's eastern terminus?

Abraham Lincoln. He had quizzed a young railroad surveyor about routes west at Council Bluffs in 1859, and the Union Pacific's boss then started building from Omaha, across the river, anyway.

Before the railroad, ships carrying freight from New York to California sailed around which cape?

Cape Horn. The voyage took months, and even the Central Pacific's own locomotives came that way in pieces; once the rails met, the crossing took a week or two.

Which general wrote in 1867 that "thieving, ragged Indians" would not stop the railroads?

William Tecumseh Sherman. His first postwar command covered the plains the line had to cross, and he made guarding the men building it his top priority.

Which animal's vast herds were all but wiped out once the railroad brought hunters and a market for hides?

Bison. Hunters came out by the carload and the hides went east by rail, and herds counted in the tens of millions were down to a few hundred animals by the end of the century.

Which Utah city took over as the junction between the two railroads in 1870?

Ogden. Once the two companies moved their meeting point there, the wild boomtown at the original site emptied out and shrank into a helper station.

The Central Pacific's president was California's first governor from which party?

Republican. Elected in 1861, he turned the first shovel of his own railroad while in office and steered state money its way, then was out of the governorship after a single term.

Which hardware merchant heard an engineer pitch a Pacific railroad in 1860 and rounded up its first backers?

Collis Huntington. He put up $1,500, talked four fellow Gold Rush shopkeepers into matching it, and went on to spend years in Washington as the railroad's lobbyist.