Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
iron one. It was driven into place by one of the railroad work-
ers whose name, as far as I can tell, has long since been lost to
history.
One other item of interest to those of us who are trivia buffs:
America's transcontinental railroad and another monumen-
tal feat of engineering, the Suez Canal, were both completed in
1869, a coincidence that gave Jules Verne the idea for Around the
World in 80 Days .
The Stream Becomes a Flood
It's hard for us to imagine the impact on the country when the
transcontinental railroad was finally opened. It had taken a full
six months to reach California or Oregon by wagon train from
one of the several jump-off points in the Midwest, and one out of
every ten pioneers died during the crossing. Then, almost literally
overnight, you could travel in relative safety and comfort all the
way from New York City to Sacramento in just under a week.
And people started to do so by the thousands.
If the western movement of people was a stream, then the
mail they sent and received soon became a flood. Before the trans-
continental link, mail was either carried by stagecoach or around
South America by sailing ship, which took several months. Sud-
denly trains had the capacity to carry large quantities of mail at
low cost and at unheard of speed: from the Atlantic to the Pacific
in less than a week. Letters and packages were sorted en route in
mail cars. Speed was everything. Bags of mail were thrown from
trains or snatched from trackside poles as trains sped through
small towns all across America. There was glamour attached to
speedy mail service, and the railroads gave it top priority. Trains
brought news for the masses, too—more of it and faster than ever
before. Newspapers printed in major cities were being delivered
by train to subscribers in small town America within hours.
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