How the Transcontinental railroad forever changed the US

It spread Anglo-European culture across the nation and caused trade to flourish, but the story of the Chinese labourers who built the track has largely been forgotten.

"You can almost feel the pain it took," said Roland Hsu, standing inside the train tunnels along Donner Summit in California's Sierra Nevada mountains.

Jagged and bumpy, the walls of the tunnel hardly resemble underpasses made by modern-day machinery. Instead, in the 1860s, teams of Chinese labourers blasted through the granite and painstakingly hand-chiselled 15 shafts through the Sierra Nevada so that the first transcontinental railroad could whisk passengers 1,800 miles from Sacramento, California, to Omaha, Nebraska, cutting travel times from six months to just six days and forever transforming the nation.

"It took four men to hold a big iron bar to manually drill a hole into the granite," said Hsu, director of research for Stanford's Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project (CRWNAP), which seeks to shed more light on the experiences of Chinese railroad workers. "A fifth man would pound it with a sledgehammer. Then they would rotate the bar a quarter turn and pound it again, and so on. This was how they drilled the hole to then pack the black powder, light it and run. There were no hydraulics."

This strenuous construction process meant that workers only cleared inches a day; it took two and a half years to bore through the nearly 1,700ft-long tunnel at Donner Summit. Look closely, Hsu said, and "you can still see the drill marks".

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