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The first ocean to ocean railroad was not laid across the American plains but through the jungle of Panama. Driven by the California Gold Rush, the Panama Railway ran just 48 miles, cost about $8 million in 1855 money and needed more than 7,000 workers from around the world, many of whom faced malaria and cholera. In Africa, Cecil Rhodes pushed a Cape to Cairo line of British control while France planned an east to west route from Dakar, and the two schemes collided at the Fashoda incident in Sudan, where the French withdrew. In the United States, Asa Whitney brought the first concrete plan to Congress in 1845, the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862, 1864 and 1867 supplied land grants, and the Union Pacific and Central Pacific met at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

The episode then follows the people who built the lines and what happened to them. The Central Pacific drew up to 90 percent of its workforce from Chinese laborers, many from Guangdong, who blasted tunnels through Sierra Nevada granite and staged an organized eight day strike in 1867. The 1868 Burlingame Treaty welcomed Chinese immigration, but after the Panic of 1873 came the Page Act, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1892 Geary Act. The hosts also cover Australia’s five track gauges, Canada’s Canadian Pacific as a barrier against American expansion, and the Trans-Siberian Railway, completed in 1905 and still the longest line in the world.

• A seamless coast to coast trip was impossible in 1869 because passengers had to be ferried across the Missouri River until the Omaha bridge opened in 1873.
• Chinese workers suffered far less dysentery than white crews because they drank boiled water as tea and bathed daily in hot water.
• The Geary Act required Chinese residents to carry residence certificates and denied bail in habeas corpus proceedings.
• Travel from Perth to Brisbane meant unloading every passenger and every piece of freight at each of five gauge changes.
• Before a route was blasted around Lake Baikal, Trans-Siberian trains crossed the water on icebreaker ferries.