Once upon a time, America was a very big country with no way to cross it quickly.
If you lived on one side, near the Atlantic Ocean, and you wanted to visit someone on the other side, near the Pacific Ocean, you had a long, long trip ahead of you. You could ride in a wagon pulled by horses or oxen, bumping along for months, over rivers and deserts and mountains. Or you could sail on a ship all the way around the bottom of South America. That took months too.
Some people had a big idea. "What if," they said, "we built a railroad all the way across the country? Then a train could carry people from one side to the other in about a week!"
It was a giant idea. And it needed a giant plan.
Two teams, building toward each other
Here was the plan. Two railroad companies would build the track. One company, called the Central Pacific, would start in California, in the west, and build toward the east. The other company, called the Union Pacific, would start in the middle of the country, in Nebraska, and build toward the west.
They would build and build and build, toward each other, until the two tracks met in the middle.
Can you put your two hands far apart, and then slowly bring them together until your fingers touch? That's what the two railroads were doing, except their hands were made of steel rails, and they were hundreds and hundreds of miles apart.
Hard, hard work
Building a railroad back then was very hard work. There were no big machines to help. People did almost all of it with shovels, picks, hammers and their own strong arms.
The Central Pacific had the hardest job of all. Right at the start, they had to build through the Sierra Nevada, tall mountains covered in deep snow. Thousands of workers who had come from China did most of that work. They cut paths along steep cliffs. They dug tunnels right through solid rock, a little bit at a time. In winter, the snow piled higher than houses, and still they kept working.
The Union Pacific workers had a long way to go too. Many of them had come from Ireland, and many had been soldiers. They laid track across the wide, flat plains, mile after mile, with the wind blowing and the sun beating down.
Every day, the workers carried the heavy rails, set them down on wooden ties, and hammered in spikes to hold them. Clang! Clang! Clang! Day after day after day, for years.
Meeting in the middle
Finally, after six years of work, the two tracks were almost touching. They met at a place in Utah called Promontory Summit.
On May 10, 1869, people gathered for a big celebration. Two steam engines rolled up, one from each railroad. The Central Pacific engine was called Jupiter. The Union Pacific engine was called Number 119. They stopped right in front of each other, nose to nose, as if they were saying hello.
There was just one little gap left in the track. For the celebration, someone had made a very special spike out of shiny gold.
Workers set the golden spike in place. A man named Leland Stanford, one of the leaders of the Central Pacific, lifted a silver hammer high in the air. Everyone held their breath. He swung the hammer down and...
...he missed!
Whoosh, right past the spike. Imagine all those workers who had swung hammers every single day for six years, watching that!
DONE!
But it didn't matter. A telegraph operator was standing nearby. The telegraph was a way to send messages over wires, using clicks and beeps. He tapped out one single word and sent it all across the country:
DONE
In cities far away, people got the message. Bells rang. Cannons boomed. People cheered in the streets. The railroad across America was finished!
Afterward, the golden spike was taken out to keep it safe, and a plain iron spike was hammered in to finish the track for real. But everybody remembers the golden one.
A country connected
From that day on, a trip across the country that used to take months took only about a week. Families could visit each other. Letters and packages could travel faster. Farmers could send their crops to faraway cities. The whole country felt a little bit closer together.
And it all happened because thousands and thousands of workers, from many different places, worked together, building toward each other until they met in the middle.
The End