Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 by Stephen E. Ambrose, Karolina Harris, Union Pacific Museum Collection Read Free Book Online Page A

rivers and gorges.
    It had been thought originally that human beings could not travel at sixty miles per hour, that trains could not climb an incline or go around a curve. But soon engineers discovered that they could climb a grade of 2 percent, or 106 feet per mile, and that a train could manage a curve of ten degrees (radius 574 feet). And sixty miles per hour did not harm the passengers. 28
    O
N May 30, 1854, Judah reported to the owners of the Sacramento Valley Railroad that the line from Sacramento to Folsom, on the western edge of the Sierra, was more favorable than any he had ever known. There were no deep cuts to make, no high embankments to be built, and the grade was nearly as regular and uniform as an inclined plane. A railroad could be built at a cost of $33,000 per mile, including everything. He had counted the potential freight-and-passenger traffic on the routeand calculated probable earnings for the corporation. They would be huge. “With such a Road and such a business,” he concluded, “it is difficult to conceive of a more profitable undertaking.” 29 He was too low on his cost estimate and too high on the earning potential, but not by much.
    In June, the
Sacramento Union,
one of the leading newspapers in the state and one where Judah had friends, reported, “Mr. Judah is pushing the survey and location with as much rapidity and energy as is consistent with correctness.” 30 By June 20, his surveys had reached Folsom. On November 30, the Sacramento Valley Railroad, financed by stock on which investors had put 10 percent down, signed a contract with a well-known firm of Eastern contractors, Robinson, Seymour & Company, for a total of $1.8 million, of which $800,000 was paid in capital stock at par and $700,000 in 10 percent twenty-year bonds ($45,000 per mile).
    On February 12, 1855, actual grading commenced with a one-hundred-man workforce. Robinson, Seymour started sending rails and rolling stock on the clipper ship
Winged Racer.
It arrived in June. On August 9, the first rail west of the Missouri, and the first in California, was laid. Two days later, Judah, assisted by three officials of the company, carried a handcar to the tracks and took the first ever railroad ride in California, for a distance of four hundred feet.
    Shortly thereafter, the locomotive
Sacramento
landed on the levee, and on August 17 a trial trip to Seventeenth Street delighted the delegation from San Francisco, hundreds strong, who made the journey. By January 1, 1856, the road was bringing in $200 a day. By Washington’s Birthday, it had been completed to Folsom and held a grand opening excursion and a ball. 31 A railroad had come to the Pacific Coast.
    Over the following months, Judah worked on various railroad surveys and projects; the Sacramento Valley Railroad had a difficult time staying in business, because receipts from the placer mines west of the Sierra fell off and the population of the canyon towns diminished. He was with the California Central Railroad and the Benicia and Sacramento Valley Railroad Company, and then became chief engineer of a yet-to-be-built line called the Sacramento Valley Central Railroad.
    Meanwhile, in 1856, he and Anna made three sea voyages back east, to go to Washington to promote a transcontinental railroad, on the correct assumption that only the federal government could afford—by selling the public lands it held—to finance it. By then the railroad across the country had become an obsession with the young engineer. He was ambitious,accustomed to thinking big and getting done what he set out to do, and eager to seize the opportunity. Anna later wrote, “Everything he did from the time he went to California to the day of his death was for the great continental Pacific railway. Time, money, brains, strength, body and soul were absorbed. It was the burden of his thought day and night, largely of his conversation, till it used to be said ‘Judah’s