Transcontinental Railroad Trivia
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50 free Transcontinental Railroad trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The first transcontinental railroad stitched Omaha to Sacramento in six years of blasting, tunnelling and track-laying, and ended with a gold spike and a one-word telegram. These 50 questions cover how it was financed, who built it, where the two lines met and what the whole thing changed. Expect the famous names (Stanford, Durant, Judah) but also the details teachers and trivia hosts love: the ten-mile day, the Chinese crews who carved the Sierra tunnels, the checkerboard land grants and the Crédit Mobilier scandal that followed. Every answer is sourced so you can use it in class, at a pub quiz or just to settle an argument.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which canal opened in 1869, the same year as the transcontinental railroad?
Suez
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.
Q 02At which Utah Territory location did the Central Pacific and Union Pacific meet in 1869?
Promontory Summit
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.
Q 03Who ceremonially drove the golden Last Spike?
Leland Stanford
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.
Q 04As Secretary of War in the 1850s, which future Confederate leader oversaw the Army's surveys for a Pacific railroad?
Jefferson Davis
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.
Q 05What one-word telegraph message announced the line's completion?
DONE
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.
Q 06From which California city did the Central Pacific start building east in 1863?
Sacramento
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.
Q 07Which Central Pacific locomotive took part in the Last Spike ceremony?
Jupiter
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.
Q 08Why did Union Pacific boss Thomas Durant arrive two days late for the last-spike ceremony?
Unpaid workers held his train
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.
Q 09What did thousands of Chinese workers on the Central Pacific do for a week in June 1867?
Went on strike
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.
Q 10By what nickname were the Central Pacific's Chinese workers commonly known at the time?
Celestials
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.
Q 11Which of the Central Pacific's Big Four pushed to hire Chinese crews over his foreman's objections?
Charles Crocker
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.
Q 12What happened to the golden spike as soon as the last-spike ceremony was over?
Pulled out and replaced
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.
Q 13Which engineer surveyed the Sierra route and lobbied Congress for the railroad?
Theodore Judah
Q 21What did North America's railroads introduce on November 18, 1883?
Standard time zones
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.
Q 22The Central Pacific crossed the Sierra over which pass?
Donner
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.
Q 23The 1904 Lucin Cutoff took trains off the original golden-spike route by running straight across what?
The Great Salt Lake
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.
Q 14What disease killed the Central Pacific's original chief engineer in 1863?
Yellow fever
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.
Q 15Union Pacific boss Thomas Durant built his stake during the Civil War by smuggling which contraband crop?
Cotton
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.
Q 16Which Union general served as Union Pacific's chief engineer during construction?
Grenville Dodge
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.
Q 17Which scandal over inflated construction contracts ensnared Union Pacific figures?
Crédit Mobilier
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.
Q 18Into which larger rail system was the Central Pacific absorbed in 1885?
Southern Pacific
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.
Q 19Land grants to the railroads were laid out in what pattern?
Checkerboard
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.
Q 20Which land deal did the United States make largely to secure a southern route for a Pacific railroad?
The Gadsden Purchase
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.
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.
Q 24Which explosive did the Central Pacific manufacture on site to speed work on its Summit Tunnel?
Nitroglycerin
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.
Q 25What did the Central Pacific build over 37 miles of its Sierra track?
Timber snow sheds
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.
Q 26How much track did the Central Pacific lay in its record day of April 1869?
10 miles
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.
Q 27What were the mobile tent towns that followed the Union Pacific railhead nicknamed?
Hell on Wheels
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.
Q 28Which river valley did the Union Pacific follow west across Nebraska?
Platte
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.
Q 29Which Wyoming town did the Union Pacific found in 1867 and build into one of its main railroad centers?
Cheyenne
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.
Q 30Which religious leader contracted to supply grading crews to the Union Pacific?
Brigham Young
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.