They Cut Through Solid Granite by Hand to Build This Railroad

In the winter of 1866, at the summit of the Sierra Nevada, snowdrifts piled up to forty feet deep. Underneath them, men lived in tunnels dug through the snow — and inside the mountain, by lamplight, they drilled into solid granite by hand. On a good day, the tunnel face moved about a foot. Most of those men were born in China. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, two locomotives met nose to nose, a final spike was driven, and a telegraph operator sent one word to the entire nation: DONE. A journey that took months now took about a week. This is the story of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific: paid by the mile, racing each other across a continent. Of Theodore Judah, who found the route and never saw it built. Of fifteen tunnels, nitroglycerin mixed on site, locomotives hauled over the summit on sleds, a strike broken by hunger, and ten miles of track laid in a single day. And of who was left out of the famous photograph at the end — the Chinese workers who built most of the Central Pacific, and the Plains nations whose lands the railroad crossed. CHAPTERS 00:00 Under the snow 02:38 Six months to California 04:28 Paid by the mile 06:11 Nobody to build it 07:59 Granite 09:55 The other railroad 11:47 The winter 13:51 Out of the mountains 15:24 Ten miles in a day 16:44 Done 18:25 The photograph 19:47 The hidden domino 21:14 The reflection SOURCES & IMAGE CREDITS All photographs are in the public domain, drawn from Library of Congress, National Archives, Stanford University and other public-domain collections of Alfred A. Hart, Andrew J. Russell, Carleton Watkins and period publications via Wikimedia Commons. Full per-image credits are in the pinned comment. A NOTE ON THE NARRATION This video uses a synthetic (AI-generated) narration voice. No real person's voice is imitated or cloned. #TranscontinentalRailroad #AmericanHistory #Engineering