What is the transcontinental railroad kids definition?

The definition of Transcontinental is crossing a continent. The Transcontinental Railroad was a railway that was commissioned to be built from Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, California.



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(4) Transcontinental railroad The term “Transcontinental Railroad” means the approximately 1,912-mile continuous railroad constructed between 1863 and 1869 extending from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to San Francisco, California.

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The transcontinental railroad was built in six years almost entirely by hand. Workers drove spikes into mountains, filled the holes with black powder, and blasted through the rock inch by inch. Handcarts moved the drift from cuts to fills.

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Transcontinental Railroad Facts
  • It was built to connect the United States' East and West Coasts. ...
  • Approximately 1,800 miles of track. ...
  • The transcontinental railroad cost roughly $100 million. ...
  • Workers came from a wide range of backgrounds and ethnicity. ...
  • President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act.


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Railways were introduced in England in the seventeenth century as a way to reduce friction in moving heavily loaded wheeled vehicles. The first North American gravity road, as it was called, was erected in 1764 for military purposes at the Niagara portage in Lewiston, New York.

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Here are some of the ways that the first transcontinental railroad—and the many other transcontinental lines that followed it—changed America.
  • It made the Western U.S. more important. ...
  • It made commerce possible on a vast scale. ...
  • It made travel more affordable. ...
  • It changed where Americans lived.


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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.

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Good and bad The railroad is credited, for instance, with helping to open the West to migration and with expanding the American economy. It is blamed for the near eradication of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the decimation of the buffalo and the exploitation of Chinese railroad workers.

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railroad, mode of land transportation in which flange-wheeled vehicles move over two parallel steel rails, or tracks, either by self-propulsion or by the propulsion of a locomotive.

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The speed of trains varied according to the conditions of tracks and bridges, dropping to nine miles per hour over hastily built sections and increasing to thirty-five miles per hour over smoother tracks. Most travelers of the early 1870*5 mentioned eighteen to twenty-two miles per hour as the average.

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The author was just one of the thousands of people who flocked to the Transcontinental Railroad beginning in 1869. The railroad, which stretched nearly 2,000 miles between Iowa, Nebraska and California, reduced travel time across the West from about six months by wagon or 25 days by stagecoach to just four days.

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Today, most of the transcontinental railroad line is still in operation by the Union Pacific (yes, the same railroad that built it 150 years ago). The map at left shows sections of the transcon that have been abandoned throughout the years.

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Answer and Explanation: The entire United States benefited financially from the joining of two railroads to form one transcontinental railroad. However, two industries benefited the most from the Transcontinental Railroad. Those were cotton and cattle.

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The railroad opened the way for the settlement of the West, provided new economic opportunities, stimulated the development of town and communities, and generally tied the country together.

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The building of America's railroads involved African Americans, many working as slaves. Virtually every railroad built in the Pre-emancipation Era South was built using slave labor. During the Civil War (1861–1865) the US Military Railroads (USMRR) employed thousands of freeman and contraband slaves (as seen here).

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Building 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 miles (212 km) of track from the road's western terminus at Alameda/Oakland to Sacramento, California.

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