transcontinental railroad

<p><span class="deck">Snowshed crews on the Central Pacific, battling blizzards and snowslides, built “the longest house in the world”</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">The official painting is full of dignity and decorum lamentably absent in the actual photograph.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">The Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory—and the nation had truly been railroaded</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Our half-known new western empire was mapped, in a great mass exploration, by the Army’s Pacific Railroad Surveys of 1853</span></p>

<p>What it was like for the first travelers</p>

<p>In a classic model of government corruption, the promoters placed shares of the company's stock “where it will do most good"—in the pockets of key Congressmen</p>
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<p><span class="deck">Building the transcontinental railroad was the greatest engineering feat of the nineteenth century. Was it also the biggest swindle?</span></p>

<p>They created towns and became the center of Western life, enabling wheat, cattle, and minerals to flow out of the West.</p>

<p>Completed 150 years ago this month, the railroad's construction was one of the great dramas in American history, and led to a notorious scandal.</p>