Seven Wonders of the Industrial World 4. Transcontinental Railway (1 of 22)

Seven Wonders of the Industrial World

This is the true story of a line, two thousand miles long.
A line that united a nation and tore it apart.
The more lndians we can kill today the fewer we will have to be killed in the next war.
Will someone go over there and help my men.
A line that crossed the wilderness and turned it in to the wild west.
For every worker who dies in that accident, we lose four in a shoot out.
A line that fought men, and mountains.
There's a lot of men buried under those rocks.
You can't build a railroad under fifty feet of snow.
It was the greatest line the world had ever built.
No one in the world, no one can do it as well as we do.

It 's not simply tracks for a railroad we're laying.
We did it damn it.
It 's the foundation for a magnificent highway of cities.
We have finished the job that Christopher Columbus started.
It was the world's first transcontinental railroad.
In 1863 the United States was falling apart.
North and South were divided by civil war.
East and West by the wilderness.
The young nation stood on the brink of collapse.
But at the height of the conflict President Lincoln issued a remarkable challenge.
He called upon America's finest engineers to build a railroad.
It would run from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It would have to climb fast mountain ranges across hundreds of miles of desert and prairie.
It would have to bridge canyons a mile wide and chasms a thousand feet deep.