Nowadays, when such means of transportation and communication as air transport and the Internet are making our life much easier and more comfortable than it used to be a hundred years ago, railroads do not play such an essential role as they played in the past. Still, this means of transport has influenced greatly the US national economy. It was one of the main factors that promoted westward expansion and national economic growth.
The development of railroads began in the XIXth century and reached its high by the second half of the century, when everybody could see all the advantages of railway transport. Those days, it was the most comfortable means of transport for people. It secured quick and convenient transportation of goods, especially the ones which had short shelf life. We should not forget that railroads construction itself was a labor intensive process that provided many people with job and consumed a lot of steel and iron.
When the Pacific railroad existed only in projects, people expected a lot from it. These expectations concerned mainly public benefit. Horace Greeley wrote that the railroad would reduce the time of mails transit to ten days. He also paid attention to the fact that only a few women lived in California when the railroad did not exist, because the journey to California was very long and hard. The hardships of the journey scared not only those women who had not yet left for California, but also many other people who stayed there, separated from their families, waiting for an opportunity to go home or to bring their families to California for life. Railroad would make a journey across the continent easier for all the migrants who would like to settle on the Pacific. Greeley also pointed out that the railroad would bring new opportunities for education in California – schoolbooks would be delivered and educated citizens would arrive at the west coast bringing there their knowledge and experience.
Now the historians can see to what extent these predictions proved to be true. Firstly, the expansion of railroads animated the US national economy. It happened due to the fact that railroads provided communications between different parts of the country. So factories and plants could deliver their production to wherever it was necessary; they could develop, building new production facilities in other states, where the rails were laid. Then, speaking about the Pacific railroad, we can say that it favored the migration of labor to the western part of the country. Workers set off for California, hoping to find better conditions of life and work there, to earn some money, or to find any job if they had none in their native states. The last but not least, those railroads that were still under construction were an outlet for steel and iron, and provided many people with places of work.
The Pacific railroad also furthered westward expansion. As said above, it considerably facilitated the journey to the West. First people looking for a job, then everybody who hoped …