Transportation and Communication
of the Industrial Revoltuion
Instructions:
National Road
Erie Canal
Steam Locomotives/Transcontinental Railroad
The Transcontinental Railroad changed the way people would travel to the West from 1863 -1869. It was built from the East Coast of the US to California. Building the railroad was hard work. Weather conditions were tough in the mountains during the winter. A lot of times the only way to travel over the mountains was to go through the mountains by blasting a tunnel. The Central Pacific Railroad had to blast a number of tunnels through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Workers were only able to blast around 1 foot per day on average. While the Central Pacific Railroad had to deal with mountains and snow, the Union Pacific Railroad had to deal with Native Americans. As the Natives became to realize the "Iron Horse" would be a threat to their way of life, they began to raid the railroad work sites. The majority of the workers on the Union Pacific Railroad were Irish Immigrants who came to the United States to escape the potato famine ravishing thier homeland. The Central Pacific Railroad was built mainly by Chinese immigrants. The two railroads finially met at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10th, 1869. The final spike was called the "Goldon Spike". Before the Transcontinental Railroad was built, it cost $1000 to travel between California and New York and could take up to 6 months. After it was built, the price dropped to $150 and the trip took a week. The building of the railroad linked the Norteast to the West connecting the country as it had never been connected before. The railroad made it easy to ship produce, textiles (cloth), and other goods from the North and Mid-West to the West. It also led to more settlement of the vast Western and Mid-Western plains. Hundereds of frontier towns sprang up along train junctions and depots.