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The manual labor to build the Central Pacific's roadbed, bridges and tunnels was done primarily by many thousands of emigrant workers from China under the direction of skilled non-Chinese supervisors. The Chinese were commonly referred to at the time as 'Celestials' and China as the 'Celestial Kingdom'.<br/><br/> Labor-saving devices in those days consisted primarily of wheelbarrows, horse or mule pulled carts, and a few railroad pulled gondolas. The construction work involved an immense amount of manual labor.
The First Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the 'Pacific Railroad' and later as the 'Overland Route') was a 1,907-mile (3,069 km) contiguous railroad line constructed in the United States between 1863 and 1869 west of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to connect the Pacific coast at San Francisco Bay with the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa.<br/><br/> Opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869 with the ceremonial driving of the 'Last Spike' at Promontory Summit, the road established a mechanized transcontinental transportation network that revolutionized the settlement and economy of the American West by bringing these western states and territories firmly and profitably into the Union and making goods and transportation much quicker, cheaper, and more flexible from coast to coast.