A Foot a Day: The Tunnel That Built the Transcontinental Railroad

🚂 Almost every photograph in this film shows work done by people who are not in it. That is not a stylistic choice, it is what the archive contains. There are hundreds of surviving photographs of the first American transcontinental railroad, showing cuttings, embankments, trestles, tunnel mouths and empty track running into a landscape. There are very few of the men who made any of it, and the largest part of that workforce was Chinese. The summit tunnel under Donner Pass is one thousand six hundred and sixty feet of solid granite. The method was one man holding a steel drill against the rock while one or two others swung eighteen-pound sledgehammers at it. Ten inches deep, pack with black powder, blast, clear, repeat. Around the clock in three shifts. Progress was about one foot per day per face. Also in this film: why the Pacific Railroad Act only passed after the southern states walked out of Congress, how paying the companies by the mile led them to build parallel grades past each other in opposite directions, the record ten miles and fifty-six feet of track laid by hand in a single day on 28 April 1869, and the thirty-seven miles of timber snow sheds built to keep the line open at all. And the famous photograph at Promontory Summit. Look at it, and count the Chinese faces. Thirteen years later Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. 📷 Every picture in this film is a real archive photograph. Nothing is recreated. 🗂️ All images are public domain, from the US National Archives, the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons. #transcontinentalrailroad #history #archivefootage #railroad #1869