USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California (CPRR) constructed 690 miles (1, 110 km) east from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory.

Detailed explanation-2: -Newcastle, CA. Central Pacific Railroad began operating freight and passenger trains over the first 31 miles of track to Newcastle in June 1864. The line began in Sacramento, the railroad’s western terminus.

Detailed explanation-3: -The Central Pacific Railroad blasted a total of 15 tunnels through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It took Chinese workers on the Central Pacific fifteen months to drill and blast through 1, 659 ft of rock to complete the Summit Tunnel at Donner Pass in Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Detailed explanation-4: -The Pacific Railroad Act stipulated that the Central Pacific Railroad Company would start building in Sacramento and continue east across the Sierra Nevada, while a second company, the Union Pacific Railroad, would build westward from the Missouri River, near the Iowa-Nebraska border.

Detailed explanation-5: -The Central Pacific had to run train track through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Working three shifts around the clock, Chinese immigrants hand drilled holes into which they packed black powder and later nitroglycerine. The progress in the tunnels through the mountains was agonizingly slow, an average of a foot a day.