In addition to Chinese workers and Latter-Day Saints who worked for Central Pacific, Irish immigrants fleeing famine and newly freed slaves laid track across the Great Plains for the Union Pacific Railroad.
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The building of the Transcontinental Railroad relied on the labor of thousands of migrant workers, including Chinese, Irish, and Mormons workers. On the western portion, about 90% of the backbreaking work was done by Chinese migrants.
While Chinese workers dominated the railroad workforce in the West, most eastern and southern railroad companies relied on Black Americans to do the back-breaking construction work.
Beginning in 1863, the Union Pacific, employing more than 8,000 Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, built west from Omaha, Nebraska; the Central Pacific, whose workforce included over 10,000 Chinese laborers, built eastward from Sacramento, California.
While Chinese workers dominated the railroad workforce in the West, most eastern and southern railroad companies relied on Black Americans to do the back-breaking construction work.
In addition to Chinese workers and Latter-Day Saints who worked for Central Pacific, Irish immigrants fleeing famine and newly freed slaves laid track across the Great Plains for the Union Pacific Railroad.
Rail yard engineers, dinkey operators, and hostlers. Railroad brake, signal, and switch operators and locomotive firers. Railroad conductors and yardmasters.
Many workers contributed to the construction of railroads. On the East Coast, Native Americans, recently freed black people, and white laborers worked on the railroads. On the West Coast, many of the railroad workers were Chinese immigrants. New Jersey issued the first railroad charter in 1815.
Some of the first, longest and most ambitious railroads in the nation were built in the South beginning in the late 1820s. By 1860 the South's railroad network was one of the most extensive in the world, and nearly all of it had been constructed with slave labor.
Teachers should understand that most of the people who worked to build the transcontinental railroad were immigrants from China and Ireland. These immigrants faced discrimination in the U.S., but their labor made this national achievement possible.
These men, names like James Hill, Jay and George Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Edward Harriman, and Collis P.Huntington are largely responsible for building much of the country's network.
Central Pacific Railroad, American railroad company founded in 1861 by a group of California merchants known later as the “Big Four” (Collis P.Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker); they are best remembered for having built part of the first American transcontinental rail line.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the first modern railway, in that both the goods and passenger traffic were operated by scheduled or timetabled locomotive hauled trains.
Cornelius VanderbiltFor the rest of his career, he bought and merged companies together, monopolizing ownership of rail lines from the east coast to Chicago. Wanting to expand his empire further, the Commodore set his sights on the Erie, the longest rail line in the world at the time.