How did people react to the Transcontinental Railroad?
How did people react to the Transcontinental Railroad? It instilled national confidence. The transcontinental railroad had a major effect on how Americans perceived their nation, and it became a symbol of America's growing industrial power and a source of confidence that led them to take on even more ambitious quests.
What were the positive and negative aspects of railroad expansion?
What were the positive and negative aspects of railroad expansion? (+) allowing a huge communication network, the railroads also brought the dreams of available land, adventure. (-)caused harsh lives for the railroad workers, accidents, and diseases disabled and killed thousands of men each year.
What were two major impacts of the Transcontinental Railroad?
The Transcontinental Railroad reduced travel time from New York to California from as long as six months to as little as a week and the cost for the trip from $1,000 to $150. The reduced travel time and cost created new business and settlement opportunities and enabled quicker and cheaper shipping of goods.
How much were workers paid on the transcontinental railroad?
The railroad workers were paid, on average, a dollar a day. They lived in twenty railroad cars, including dormitories and an arsenal car containing a thousand loaded rifles. They worked hard and were usually able to lay from one to three miles of track per day depending upon the available materials.
Was the Transcontinental Railroad good or bad?
Good and bad The railroad is credited, for instance, with helping to open the West to migration and with expanding the American economy. It is blamed for the near eradication of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the decimation of the buffalo and the exploitation of Chinese railroad workers.
Did the railroad help or hurt Native Americans?
Building the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads harmed and displaced scores of American Indian tribes, including the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Shoshone, and Paiute, by altering natural resources or taking native lands.
How were the Chinese railroad workers treated?
They were paid less than white workers, and hundreds lost their lives as a result of the dangerous work, said Gordon Chang, professor of American history at Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences. A Chinese laborer works at a tunnel heading above Donner Lake on the western summit of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Did railroads help or hurt farmers?
The railroads provided the efficient, relatively cheap transportation that made both farming and milling profitable. They also carried the foodstuffs and other products that the men and women living on the single-crop bonanza farms needed to live.
How did the Transcontinental Railroad affect immigrants?
For immigrants to the United States, the Transcontinental Railroad presented an opportunity to seek their fortunes in the West. There, they found more opportunity than the port cities of the East Coast, where discrimination kept immigrants living in urban squalor.
What did railroad workers eat?
Working on the Railroad Teamsters and graders received the least, while the iron men got the healthiest sum of anybody save their foremen. Like their Irish counterparts on the Central Pacific, the Union Pacific men had a staple diet of beef, bread, and black coffee.
What was the greatest impact of the Transcontinental Railroad Why?
The completion of the first transcontinental railroad revolutionized travel, connecting areas of the Western United States with the East. Prior to its completion, traveling to the West Coast from the East required months of dangerous overland travel or an arduous trip by boat around the southern tip of South America.
Did everyone benefit from the Transcontinental Railroad?
Answer and Explanation: The entire United States benefited financially from the joining of two railroads to form one transcontinental railroad. However, two industries benefited the most from the Transcontinental Railroad. Those were cotton and cattle.
Why did people not like the Transcontinental Railroad?
For others, however, the Transcontinental Railroad undermined the sovereignty of Native nations and threatened to destroy Indigenous communities and their cultures as the railroad expanded into territories inhabited by Native Americans.
What were the disadvantages of railroads?
As a result, although rail transport has advantages such as high carrying capacity, economy, reliability and environmental impact, it also has some disadvantages such as limited flexibility, operating costs, necessity of intermodal connections and delivery time.
What were the negative effects of the transcontinental railroad?
But there was also a dark side to the historic national project. The railroad was completed by the sweat and muscle of exploited labor, it wiped out populations of buffalo, which had been essential to Indigenous communities, and it extended over land that had been unlawfully seized from tribal nations.