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To get a ride in a covered wagon costed $1,000 ($20,000 in today’s money). Once the railroad was built the price to get to America dropped 85%. This made it quicker and easier to travel, get information from one place to another, and transport goods.
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When railroad baron Leland Stanford put in a ceremonial gold spike to mark the joining together of the tracks of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad in Promontory, Utah. This formed the transcontinental railroad. The new rail connection eventually made it possible to travel in a train car from New York to San Francisco in just a week’s time. Which was brisk at the time.
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Naturalist John Muir wrote that the transcontinental railroad time and space. As Ronda explains, it changed the way that people viewed distances.
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Just a few years after the transcontinental railroad’s completion, Aaron Montgomery Ward started the first mail-order catalog business. As Ronda notes, the first transcontinental railroad, and other transcontinental lines that followed, made it possible to sell products far and wide without a physical storefront
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The transcontinental railroad was transporting $50 million worth of freight each year. In addition to transporting western food crops and raw materials to East Coast markets and manufactured goods from East Coast cities to the West Coast. Because of this, by the 1890’s American industry had the most powerful economy on the planet.
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Sixteen railroad lines operate more than 8,000 miles of track in Kansas.
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Railroads merged and got named the BNSF (Burlington Northern and Santa Fe)
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Some railroad lines were abandoned and not used anymore.
