Union Pacific Railroad Company

Union Pacific Railroad Company is a primary component of the Union Pacific Corporation. The railroad operates in twenty-three states in the United States. As of 2014, the company operated 8,500 locomotives.

The railroad's history begins in the mid-nineteenth century. From a few short lines of rail, the company became a driving force in American history.

The Pacific Railroad Act

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law on July 1, 1862. The act designated the route of the first transcontinental railroad at the thirty-second parallel. The legislation also provided expansive tracts of land for the project. The Union Pacific (UP) and the Central Pacific (CP) railroad companies were tapped to build the route. Construction began in 1863.

Thomas C. Durant was the vice president and general manager of Union Pacific. Within two years, the UP had laid just forty miles of track and spent half a million dollars to do so. Durant needed to find a way to build the railroad less expensively. He hired civil engineer Grenville Dodge as chief engineer. Both men had worked together building railroads during the Civil War.

The UP began in Omaha, Nebraska, and laid tracks west. More than eight thousand workers—mostly German, Irish, and Italian immigrants—labored on the UP portion of the railroad. The Central Pacific began in Sacramento, California, with more than ten thousand Chinese workers toiling to lay tracks headed east. Both railroads had to contend with wildly varying terrain and weather extremes. Winters were bitterly cold, while the summer sun baked the landscape.

Hundreds of miles of prairie presented a considerable problem: few trees, which were needed to make railroad ties. The rails themselves are anchored to the ties to keep them in place. Workers used any trees they found, no matter if they were hardwood or softwood. The ties they made often had to be transported long distances, even hundreds of miles, to the work sites. Workers toiled up to sixteen hours every day under dangerous conditions.

Supplies were transported vast distances from the Missouri River. Forty cars full of supplies—including fuel, rails, hardware, and food for people and animals—were needed for every mile of track completed. As the rails advanced, the distance the supplies traveled grew as well.

The UP frequently came into conflict with Native Americans. The native peoples tried to protect their lands against the immigrants who came with the railroad. General William Tecumseh Sherman, head of the Military Division of the West, knew the plains tribes relied on buffalo for food, clothing, and shelter. He concocted a plan that brought trains full of hunters, who shot the animals to clear the land. Tens of millions of buffalo were shot and left to rot along the tracks.

The railway changed the landscape. Dodge chose when to build trestles to cross gorges and canyons, or when to blast through ridges. In their haste to lay track, both the UP and CP approved shoddy work.

As the UP and CP drew closer, the railways were not aligned. Each company had chosen a line and hoped the government would choose it as the correct one. In the end, the government selected a jointure midway between them at Promontory, Utah.

The Transcontinental Railroad was united when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific tracks met at Promontory. Trains carted dignitaries and journalists to the site. Telegraph operators tapped out messages to the coasts, describing the scene. The final spikes were driven on May 10, 1869, in an event known as the Golden Spike ceremony.

Prior to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, travelers spent months crossing the frontier. The new railroad connected New York City and San Francisco, California, through a journey of just ten days. Construction of other lines further opened the country's interior to exploration and settlement.

The Union Pacific Railroad Company continued to expand. It purchased a number of regional railroads. In 1936, the UP opened America's first western ski resort, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Railroad workers invented the ski lift for the destination. Railways transitioned from steam locomotives to diesel-electric engines. As the twentieth century advanced, the UP was part of several mergers.

Passenger service for most railways in the United States declined steadily as automobiles and air travel replaced trains. In 1971, Amtrak was granted most of the country's passenger service through the national Rail Passenger Service Act. Freight service continued to expand into the twenty-first century, and the company invested in low-emission diesel locomotives.

Impact

The companies of the Transcontinental Railroad greatly affected the future of the United States. The day after the ceremonial spike was pounded home, a freight train filled with teas from Japan left California and steamed eastward. A decade after it opened, an estimated $50 million in freight traveled the railroads every year. East Coast manufacturers had ready access to materials from across the country, and industry flourished.

Passengers, who once had to choose between crossing the continent on dusty trails or sailing a dangerous ocean route through Panama, could journey from coast to coast in comparative safety. People's horizons expanded because travel became more available to wider audiences. Ideas, in the form of books, newspapers, and other printed materials, quickly spread from coast to coast and north to south. Settlers were no longer daunted by the loneliness of the wilderness, and many readily moved to the continent's interior.

For the Native Americans, however, the UP and CP continued to bring disaster. As settlers streamed into the central regions, their hunger for land grew. The government forged new treaties, but in the end, most Native Americans were pushed out. Many sport hunters still felled the buffalo and left them. Others used the railways to transport thousands of hides east for profit, until the beasts neared extinction. The buffalo that remained were widely scattered and not able to sustain the native peoples.

Bibliography

"Chronological History." Union Pacific. Union Pacific Railroad Company. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. http://www.up.com/aboutup/history/chronology/index.htm

"Company Overview." Union Pacific. Union Pacific Railroad Company. Web. 21 Jan. 2016. http://www.up.com/aboutup/corporate‗info/uprrover/

"Congress and the American West: The Transcontinental Railroad." Treasures of Congress. National Archives and Records Administration. Web. 21 Jan. 2016. http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/treasures‗of‗congress/page‗15.html

"Construction." Union Pacific. Union Pacific Railroad Company. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. http://www.up.com/aboutup/history/overview/construction/index.htm

"The Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad." American Experience. WGBH Educational Foundation. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tcrr-impact/

King, Gilbert. "Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed." Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution. 17 July 2012. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/?no-ist