But the project also devastated forests, displaced many Native American tribes and rapidly expanded Anglo-European influence across the country. As new towns sprung up along the rail line, it changed where Americans lived, spurred westward expansion and made travel more affordable. It caused trade to flourish, and by 1880, the railroad was moving $50m worth of freight each year. This monumental engineering feat had massive effects for the US. Look closely, Hsu said, and "you can still see the drill marks". This strenuous construction process meant that workers only cleared inches a day it took two and a half years to bore through the nearly 1,700ft-long tunnel at Donner Summit. This was how they drilled the hole to then pack the black powder, light it and run. Then they would rotate the bar a quarter turn and pound it again, and so on. "A fifth man would pound it with a sledgehammer. "It took four men to hold a big iron bar to manually drill a hole into the granite," said Hsu, director of research for Stanford's Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project (CRWNAP), which seeks to shed more light on the experiences of Chinese railroad workers. Instead, in the 1860s, teams of Chinese labourers blasted through the granite and painstakingly hand-chiselled 15 shafts through the Sierra Nevada so that the first transcontinental railroad could whisk passengers 1,800 miles from Sacramento, California, to Omaha, Nebraska, cutting travel times from six months to just six days and forever transforming the nation. Jagged and bumpy, the walls of the tunnel hardly resemble underpasses made by modern-day machinery. "You can almost feel the pain it took," said Roland Hsu, standing inside the train tunnels along Donner Summit in California's Sierra Nevada mountains.
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