Steam over the Sierra

The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento into the Sierra Nevada beginning in 1863, and the mountains took it the better part of five years. Crews, most of them Chinese immigrants, cut ledges into granite above the American River, bored fifteen tunnels through the range, and stood trestles across ravines on timber alone. The summit at Donner Pass is over 7,000 feet. When the rails met the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869, the hardest miles of the whole line were already behind them.

J. M. W. Turner painted Rain, Steam and Speed in 1844, when he was sixty-nine and the railway was barely a decade old; it hangs in the National Gallery in London. A locomotive comes over a bridge straight at the viewer through a downpour, and the rain, the smoke and the speed are painted as one substance. It may be the first great painting of a machine, and it treats the machine as weather.

Turner's brick viaduct becomes a timber trestle, and his English drizzle becomes Sierra light: the sun breaking through a gold haze at the upper right while the engine's smoke streams back over the cars. The locomotive comes at you head-on, headlamp lit, a red caboose closing the train behind it. To the left the gorge falls away to a white torrent, dark evergreens climb the far slope, and on a trail at the bottom a small pack train picks its way along at the pace everything moved before this.

What came over the finished line was a machine moving faster than anything in the valley below it, on a road men had cut by hand.