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Comment by weaksauce | Hacker News Reader

yeah i'm sure we could have those breakneck speed railway construction in the middle of the open, unihabited plain for the majority of it and then for the incredibly dangerous stuff we could send in the marginalized at the time chinese/irish workers to handle unstable dynamite paid half that of other workers and ignoring any and all safety regulations and building codes of today.

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China managed to build a massive high speed rail network across rough terrain and completely inhabited land in a few years. Their network is safe and reliable.

I've noticed it's becoming increasingly common to just give up and excuse everything in the US. "Well we could build new rails, but..." "Well we could get health care prices under control, but..." "Well we could solve (x problem that most other countries don't have), but..."

It's kind of a sad decline from being the world leader by far like the US was 50 years ago. There's always a billion reasons to not do something, but not much push to actually do something.

They used black powder, dynamite only became available towards the end.

You have good points, but consider it ran TWO THOUSAND MILES, not 22, and still took only 10% of the time. You say "open plain", but try driving it some time. It had to go through two mountain ranges, for example.

The workers came because they got better pay than anywhere else. This includes the Chinese and Irish. It was not built by conscripts.

death toll is not known but it's over 1000 they estimate of just chinese laborers. at the peak there were 15,000 or so workers working on the rail. in fact the main suspected etymology of "chinaman's chance[0]" (aka no chance) was because they were the demographic that did the super dangerous work that killed 6% on the low end. The construction was also not one large project but two large projects constructed in parallel and the blasting/excavating was done ahead of the time. Sure they could lay down 10 miles of track a day on open plains but the hard work was through the mountains and that's the stuff that slows the construction down like if you were to build 22 miles of track in a heavily populated area with land already claimed by other entities and having to deal with easements and other legal battles + logistics.

Nitroglycerin was used in large quantities on the central pacific railroad construction and were predominantly chinese laborers whereas the union pacific was more irish laborers. The central pacific rail owned their own TNT factory even. I am not sure what you are getting at; black powder was used but it certainly wasn't the only thing in use especially in the west.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman%27s_chance

"At the tunnels, especially Summit Tunnel, the Chinese were using great amounts of black powder, up to five hundred kegs a day."

"The CP found that, when they got to drilling holes of fifteen to eighteen inches into the granite, poured in the liquid nitroglycerin, capped the hole with a plug, and fired it with a percussion cap, the nitroglycerin did a far better job than powder. The work progressed at nearly double the speed, and the granite was broken into far smaller pieces. But the accidents proved too much. In one, after a number of charges had been set off simultaneously, a Chinese worker hit a charge of nitro that hadn't exploded with his pick. It exploded and killed him and the others working near that spot. Strobridge declared, "Bury that stuff." Crocker said to get it out of there. And even though Nobel perfected dynamite in 1866, it was never tested or used by the CP. In 1867, the CP ignored the dangers and did make and use its own nitroglycerin, but except at Summit Tunnel did not make a practice of it."

"Nothing Like It In The World", Ambrose, pg. 200-201

I'm not just quoting the book, I read the whole thing. It's really a great story.

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