Who benefited the most from the transcontinental railroad?

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 railroads provided the efficient, relatively cheap transportation that made both farming and milling profitable. They also carried the foodstuffs and other products that the men and women living on the single-crop bonanza farms needed to live.

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The Transcontinental Railroad dramatically altered ecosystems. For instance, it brought thousands of hunters who killed the bison Native people relied on. The Cheyenne experience was different. The railroad disrupted intertribal trade on the Plains, and thereby broke a core aspect of Cheyenne economic life.

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The challenge was on, “man against machine.” John Henry was known as the strongest, the fastest, and the most powerful man working on the railroad.

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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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The Transcontinental Railroad reduced travel time from New York to California from as long as six months to as little as a week and the cost for the trip from $1,000 to $150. The reduced travel time and cost created new business and settlement opportunities and enabled quicker and cheaper shipping of goods.

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Who were the economic winners and losers of the Transcontinental Railroad? Economic winners were private companies who received land and money from the government. The economic losers were the workers. Mostly poor Mexican and African Americans who received little to no pay.

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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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Railroads became a major industry, stimulating other heavy industries such as iron and steel production. These advances in travel and transport helped drive settlement in the western regions of North America and were integral to the nation's industrialization.

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The completion of the first transcontinental railroad revolutionized travel, connecting areas of the Western United States with the East. Prior to its completion, traveling to the West Coast from the East required months of dangerous overland travel or an arduous trip by boat around the southern tip of South America.

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But there was also a dark side to the historic national project. The railroad was completed by the sweat and muscle of exploited labor, it wiped out populations of buffalo, which had been essential to Indigenous communities, and it extended over land that had been unlawfully seized from tribal nations.

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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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The railroad workers were paid, on average, a dollar a day. They lived in twenty railroad cars, including dormitories and an arsenal car containing a thousand loaded rifles. They worked hard and were usually able to lay from one to three miles of track per day depending upon the available materials.

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North America's four major rail networks — Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific and Canadian National — all own lines that were built and operated with slave labor.

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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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In 1870 it took approximately seven days and cost as little as $65 for a ticket on the transcontinental line from New York to San Francisco; $136 for first class in a Pullman sleeping car; $110 for second class; and $65 for a space on a third- or “emigrant”-class bench.

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