The First Transcontinental Railroad
The First Transcontinental Railroad was a 1,912-mile (3,077 km) continuous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network with the West Coast.
It started in Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa and ended on the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay.
Chinese Workforce
The manual labor to build the Central Pacific's roadbed, bridges and tunnels were done primarily by many thousands of immigrant workers, imported from China’s Guangdong Province.
By July 1865, the Chinese workforce was nearly 4,000. In February 1867, approximately 8,000 Chinese were working on the construction of tunnels and 3,000 more were laying track, representing ninety percent of the workforce.
