Summary
How workers laid thousands of miles of track to connect America's east and west by rail — a huge effort powered largely by immigrant laborers who did dangerous work.
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Teaching resources
Discussion questions
Discussion
How workers laid thousands of miles of track to connect America's east and west by rail — a huge effort powered largely by immigrant laborers who did dangerous work.
- What did the transcontinental railroad connect?
- Who did much of the hard and dangerous work of building it?
- How did faster travel across the country change people's lives?
Quick work-a-long
Vocabulary: railroad, transcontinental, immigrant.
Try it: On a U.S. map, trace a route from one coast to the other. Imagine how long it took before trains.

