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Cheers greet trains as thousands gather to mark 150th anniversary of transcontinental railroad

By Amy Joi O'Donoghue | @amyjoi16 | May 10, 2019, 3:12pm MDT

PROMONTORY SUMMIT, Box Elder — Thousands of people are making their way to Golden Spike National Historical Park Friday morning to mark the 150th anniversary of the driving of the golden spike that marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

The celebration begins with a ceremony that tells the story of the building of the first transcontinental railroad and recognizes the thousands of workers whose efforts made the railroad a reality.

The official ceremony begins just before 11 a.m. Tickets for the park are sold out for Friday and Saturday.

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Editorial: 150 years ago, the nation united by a golden spike

May 10, 2019



The ceremony to celebrate the driving of “the golden spike,” the last link in North America’s first transcontinental railroad, which took place 150 years ago today — May 10, 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah. The two men shaking hands in the center are Samuel S. Montague, Central Pacific Railroad (center left) and Grenville M. Dodge of the Union Pacific Railroad (center right). Notice the liquor bottles that the men hanging from the front of the locomotives are showing off. Those bottles were later removed from some photos, in deference to the temperance movement. Our editorial at left looks at the significance of the event — the railroad, not the airbrushing of the liquor bottles.

Courtesy of Yale University libraries

They huddled in telegraph offices across the country, from small towns all the way up to government offices in Washington. For 27 long minutes, the whole nation seemed to fall silent. Telegraph operators were told to stand down from sending any traffic so as to keep the lines clear as everyone waited for that one special sound.

One hundred and fifty years ago today, the United States witnessed what might qualify as its first mass media event. In the century and a half to come, Americans would gather around their televisions to watch a man step onto the moon, or any number of televised spectaculars and horrors. But on the afternoon of May 10, 1869, they gathered in telegraph offices listening for a series of clicks that said nothing but also said everything.

More than half a continent away, on a remote stretch of Utah desert, an event that would transform the nation was taking place. From the west came a locomotive from the Union Pacific; from the east came one from the Central Pacific. There they sat, nearly cow-catcher to cow-catcher. Between them lay the last gap of what would soon become North America’s first transcontinental railroad. The pounding of the ceremonial “golden spike” would unite the nation, both symbolically and literally. As with many things, this was a story driven by politics, graft and, in the end, some theatrics and maybe even a little of what today we’d call “fake news.”

Being Virginians, we must start with Thomas Jefferson. His Louisiana Purchase didn’t extend all the way to the West Coast but Meriwether Lewis and William Clark went there anyway. The precise status of the Pacific Northwest remained in dispute for several decades, claimed by both the U.S. and Great Britain. Jefferson, though, was skeptical that it would wind up with either. He thought the Northwest would become “a great, free, and independent empire on that side of our continent.”

That didn’t happen, but the Mexican War did. Suddenly the United States owned a big swath of the West Coast. That was 1848. Just a week before American ownership of California became official, gold was discovered. The gold rush was on — along with a political debate about how to create a transportation network to unite a nation that spanned an entire continent. In practical terms, that meant a railroad but in even more practical terms, the question was where? In those pre-Civil War days, the North wanted a northern route. The South wanted a southern route. Nothing much got done. Then came the Civil War.

You might think that the war would have complicated things. Actually, the war simplified them. There were no longer any Southerners in Congress to object to a non-southern route. The Civil War Congress was also run by Republicans. That new political party had been formed primarily as an anti-slavery party, but it was also the national infrastructure party. One of its lesser-known planks had been to endorse a transcontinental railroad. In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act, which set in motion the entire enterprise. The act also settled on a route safely away from pesky Southerners.

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First Transcontinental Railroad



The ceremony for the driving of the "Last Spike" at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869

Overview
Locale: United States
Termini: Omaha, Nebraska (Council Bluffs, Iowa)
Alameda Terminal, starting September 6, 1869; Oakland Long Wharf, starting November 8, 1869 (San Francisco Bay)
{Later in the Wiki, it says September 8, 1869. They can't both be right. Trainorders also goes with September 6, 1869.}

Operation
Opened: May 10, 1869; 150 years ago



Transcontinental Railroad 75th Anniversary Issue stamp of 1944

The First Transcontinental Railroad ( known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route" ) was a 1,912-mile (3,077 km) continuous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay. The rail line was built by three private companies over public lands provided by extensive US land grants. Construction was financed by both state and US government subsidy bonds as well as by company issued mortgage bonds. The Western Pacific Railroad Company built 132 mi (212 km) of track from the road's western terminus at Alameda/Oakland to Sacramento, California. The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California (CPRR) constructed 690 mi (1,110 km) eastward from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. The Union Pacific built 1,085 mi (1,746 km) from the road's eastern terminus at Council Bluffs near Omaha, Nebraska westward to Promontory Summit.

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Central Pacific route

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Subsequent to the railhead's meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, the San Joaquin River Bridge at Mossdale Crossing (near present-day Lathrop, California) was completed on September 8, 1869. As a result, the western part of the route was extended from Sacramento to the Alameda Terminal in Alameda, California, and shortly thereafter, to the Oakland Long Wharf at Oakland Point in Oakland, California, and on to San Jose, California. Train ferries transferred some railroad cars to and from the Oakland wharves and tracks to wharves and tracks in San Francisco. Before the CPRR was completed, developers were building other feeder railroads like the Virginia and Truckee Railroad to the Comstock Lode diggings in Virginia City, Nevada, and several different extensions in California and Nevada to reach other cities there. Some of their main cargo was the thousands of cords of firewood needed for the many steam engines and pumps, cooking stoves, heating stoves etc. in Comstock Lode towns and the tons of ice needed by the miners as they worked ever deeper into the "hot" Comstock Lode ore body. In the mines, temperatures could get above 120 °F (49 °C) at the work face and a miner often used over 100 pounds (45 kg) of ice per shift. This new railroad connected to the Central Pacific near Reno, and went through Carson City, the new capital of Nevada.

After the transcontinental railroads were completed, many other railroads were built to connect up to other population centers in Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, Oregon, Washington territories, etc. In 1869, the Kansas Pacific Railway started building the Hannibal Bridge, a swing bridge across the Missouri River between Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas which connected railroads on both sides of the Missouri while still allowing passage of paddle steamers on the river. After completion, this became another major east-west railroad. To speed completion of the Kansas Pacific Railroad to Denver, construction started east from Denver in March 1870 to meet the railroad coming west from Kansas city. The two crews met at a point called Comanche Crossing, Kansas Territory, on August 15, 1870. Denver was now firmly on track to becoming the largest city and the future capital of Colorado. The Kansas Pacific Railroad linked with the Denver Pacific Railway via Denver to Cheyenne in 1870.

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Union Pacific route

The Union Pacific's 1,087 miles (1,749 km) of track started at MP 0.0 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on the eastern side of the Missouri River. This was chosen by the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, as the location of its Transfer Depot where up to seven railroads could transfer mail and other goods to Union Pacific trains bound for the west. Initially trains crossed the river by ferry to get to the western tracks starting in Omaha, Nebraska, in the newly formed Nebraska Territory. Winter and spring caused severe problems as the Missouri River froze over in the winter; but not well enough to support a railroad track plus train. The train ferries had to be replaced by sleighs each winter. Getting freight across a river that flooded every spring and filled with floating debris and/or ice floes became very problematic for several months of the year. (Starting in 1873, the railroad traffic crossed the river over the new 2,750 feet (840 m) long, eleven span, truss Union Pacific Missouri River Bridge to Omaha, Nebraska.)

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Aftermath

Railroad developments

When the last spike was driven, the rail network was not yet connected to the Atlantic or Pacific but merely connected Omaha to Sacramento. To get from Sacramento to the Pacific, the Central Pacific purchased the struggling Western Pacific Railroad (unrelated to the railroad of the same name that would later parallel its route) and resumed construction on it, which had halted in 1866 due to funding troubles. In November 1869, the Central Pacific finally connected Sacramento to the east side of San Francisco Bay by rail at Oakland, California, where freight and passengers completed their transcontinental link to the city by ferry.

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A tribute to the "Big Boy" locomotives produced by Union Pacific, "Last of the Giants" shows the end of a memorable era in Western Railroading. The "Big Boy" is the popular name of the American Locomotive Company 4000-class 4-8-8-4 articulated, coal-fired, steam locomotives manufactured between 1941 and 1944 and operated by the Union Pacific Railroad until 1959.