The railroad route, Central Pacific in blue, Union Pacific in red.
Our visit to the Golden Spike Historic Site was greatly enhanced by our viewing of Hell on Wheels, a TV series that ran 6 seasons. The main character, Anson Mount, pictured below, was fictional. Colm Meany played Thomas Durant, a real person - also a robber baron and a nasty, despicable, sumbitch with the morals and ethics of a goat. Baaaad goat. The series can be streamed via Netflix. Here's an overview: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1699748/
Hell on Wheels was the name given to the tent towns that sprang up every place the Union Pacific builders set up camp. It was a rowdy, bawdy bunch: gamblers, whores, purveyors of rotgut booze and so on.
There's a whole trainload of mind boggling facts about the building of the TCRR. One that really impressed me was the 1750' tunnel in the Sierra Nevada mountains built through solid granite at the rate of one foot per day. The per-day rate increased to a whopping 1.8' per day when they started using nitroglycerin.
I suppose any civil engineer worth his/her salt knows how to build a tunnel, have that tunnel take the shortest route possible, and finally, come out at exactly the right spot. I'm not a civil engineer, have no idea how it's done. Seems a miracle.
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