But must we pay Chinese reparations forever ?| Submit your comments on this article | |
| -Short Attention Span Theater- | |
| How the Transcontinental railroad forever changed the US | |
| 2023-01-02 | |
[BBC] It spread Anglo-European culture across the nation and caused trade to flourish, but the story of the Chinese labourers who built the track has largely been forgotten.
Jagged and bumpy, the walls of the tunnel hardly resemble underpasses made by modern-day machinery. Instead, in the 1860s, teams of Chinese labourers blasted through the granite and painstakingly hand-chiselled 15 shafts through the Sierra Nevada so that the first transcontinental railroad could whisk passengers 1,800 miles from Sacramento, California, to Omaha, Nebraska, cutting travel times from six months to just six days and forever transforming the nation. "It took four men to hold a big iron bar to manually drill a hole into the granite," said Hsu, director of research for Stanford's Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project (CRWNAP), which seeks to shed more light on the experiences of Chinese railroad workers. "A fifth man would pound it with a sledgehammer. Then they would rotate the bar a quarter turn and pound it again, and so on. This was how they drilled the hole to then pack the black powder, light it and run. There were no hydraulics." This strenuous construction process meant that workers only cleared inches a day; it took two and a half years to bore through the nearly 1,700ft-long tunnel at Donner Summit. Look closely, Hsu said, and "you can still see the drill marks". | |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #18 Lincoln was in bed with the railroad moguls. Lincoln was Gay? |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2023-01-02 20:41 |
| #17 ^ Cool, indeed |
| Posted by: Frank G 2023-01-02 20:00 |
| #16 In 1872 Abe's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, joined a Chicago law firm that was then named Isham, Lincoln, and Beale. Robert died in 1926, but the firm continued until 1988 and kept his name prominently displayed on their letterhead. I was in a couple of minor cases with the firm; and it was exceedingly cool for a young lawyer to get a letter with Robert Todd Lincoln's name on it. |
| Posted by: Matt 2023-01-02 18:11 |
| #15 Fascinating! Thank you all for explaining, including the things it didn’t occur to me to ask. Abe Lincoln a hotshot railroad law lawyer? That is going to come up in conversation soon, I can tell. :-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2023-01-02 17:33 |
| #14 The German invasion was accomplished largely using horse drawn logistics over unpaved roads. Same as Napoleon with the same result. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2023-01-02 15:10 |
| #13 TW, as a military historian noted that "...the USSR had fewer miles of all-weather surfaced roads than the state of Connecticut in 1939" the military logistical efforts had to be on rails. More modern version is that Russia is a big place and too poor to pave over everything when rail works 'well enough'. |
| Posted by: magpie 2023-01-02 14:43 |
| #12 Farther east, the Irish and Italians were exploited for tough, dangerous railroad work. A lot of other ways to get killed on the early railroad construction other than in tunnels. Father east, for example, the Hoosac Tunnel in western Mass. started in 1851 with an estimated cost of $2 million and ended in 1875, having expended $21 million and 135 lives. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2023-01-02 14:27 |
| #11 I suspect the Ukes and the Rooskies have the same railroad gauge, but anything west of Lvov probably has a different one. |
| Posted by: DooDahMan 2023-01-02 12:55 |
| #10 Lincoln specialized in Railroad Law after his congressional service. At the beginning of the 1850s, while in partnership with Herndon, Lincoln started dealing with railroad cases and by the middle of the decade he was considered one of the most successful Illinois practitioners of railroad law. http://www.abraham-lincoln-history.org/abraham-lincoln-the-railroad-lawyer/ |
| Posted by: NoMoreBS 2023-01-02 12:48 |
| #9 Ukraine extensively uses their railways to transport military personnel and supplies, TW. Unfortunately, most of the Ukraine rail systems are electric and the damage to the electrical systems shut many of those down. I do believe they are re-purposing diesel engines to work on some of those lines, though. |
| Posted by: Mullah Richard 2023-01-02 09:48 |
| #8 Had a little analyst at CENTCOM years ago that reported HETS (heavy equipment transports) in and out of motor parks. Saddam wasn't moving tanks anywhere without HETS and rail. Once we got her imagery and counts, everybody relaxed a bit. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-01-02 08:39 |
| #7 It is usually unnoticed that international travel changed overnight; the Transcontinental was completed in the year 1869, the same year that the Suez Canal was opened. |
| Posted by: Slavising Unineting5672 2023-01-02 08:01 |
| #6 the Prussians were particularly impressed by the exploitation of railroads. I seem to recall Russia still uses railroads to bring troops and equipment up to the border. Does Ukraine as well, or are they able to use the roads because their have less distance to travel? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2023-01-02 07:47 |
| #5 Lincoln was in bed with the railroad moguls. Very little choice, its how his armies moved and were supplied. After the Battle of Chickamauga, they moved an entire corps from the eastern theater to fill the line. While most of the European military looked upon the war as a fight between two large mobs, the Prussians were particularly impressed by the exploitation of railroads. Railroad planning became a major part of their war plans thereafter. The railroad didn't impact the aboriginals much. It was the Homestead Act of 1862 that would. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2023-01-02 06:55 |
| #4 Given the approx 70,000+/- miles of abandon track, the equipment and land no longer in use in the USA. The R&R companies should be able to recover a few $100 Billion. I'd love to purchase an Abandon Rail Tunnel, a 100 ft long. |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2023-01-02 06:32 |
| #3 But must we pay Chinese reparations forever ? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-01-02 03:16 |
| #2 The RR transported a continents worth of freaks and weirdos into San Francisco. Notice the Chinese guy and BBC made no mention of the army Irish laborers. Only explanation possible is Oriental and English racism. |
| Posted by: Waldemar the Limber5043 2023-01-02 01:46 |
| #1 The Indians got screwed by the railroad as well. In fact, Lincoln was in bed with the railroad moguls. |
| Posted by: DooDahMan 2023-01-02 00:20 |