The expansion of the railroad industry in the 1800’s was a positive development for

The completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 had a huge impact on the West. It encouraged further settlement in the West as it made travelling their cheaper and easier. It also encouraged the development of towns along the railroad, as the railroad made the west less isolated. It had a positive effect of the economy as it helped facilitate trade between the east and west of the USA, and between the USA and Asia. Likewise, it encouraged the growth of the cattle industry.

The completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 had a huge impact on the West.  It encouraged further settlement in the West as it made travelling their cheaper and easier. It also encouraged the development of towns along the railroad, as the railroad made the west less isolated. It had a positive effect of the economy as it helped facilitate trade between the east and west of the USA, and between the USA and Asia. Likewise, it encouraged the growth of the cattle industry.

The railroad also made homestead life easier. It meant homesteaders felt less isolated as they could visit friends and family from home. Before the railroad, homesteaders would have to travel back via the Oregon Trail! The railroad also gave homesteaders greater access to manufactured goods, as they could be transported easily and quickly across the railway.

However, the Transcontinental Railroad had a negative impact on the Plains Indians. They were forced to move away from the railroad despite it running through Indian Territory. The workers often killed buffalo for meat, and the track itself disrupted the Plains Indians buffalo hunting. Because of this, Plains Indians attacked railroad works and this brought them into conflict with the US army. 

The steel highway improved the lives of millions of city dwellers. By the 1890s, the United States was becoming an urban nation, and railroads supplied cities and towns with food, fuel, building materials, and access to markets. The simple presence of railroads could bring a city economic prosperity. Railroads even helped shape the physical growth of cities and towns, as steam railroads and then electric street railways facilitated growth along their lines and made suburban living feasible.

Mail, sorted enroute aboard Railway Post Office (RPO) Cars, permitted reliable and rapid communication. Railway express and the rise of mail-order merchants permitted people in the most remote rural areas to enjoy inexpensive consumer goods. Telegraphy and railroading had been inseparable since the beginning, and virtually everywhere there was a railroad, there was a telegraph wire.

In 1893, the United States celebrated the 400th anniversary of the "discovery" of the New World with a spectacular fair in Chicago. The Transportation Building at the "World's Columbian Exposition" featured railroad exhibits and equipment from around the world, but the most lavish displays were from Baldwin Locomotive Works, the Pullman Palace Car Company, and other American companies. The B&O erected a huge exhibit tracing the entire history of the railroad, while the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads had separate exhibit buildings.

The world's fair marks the high point of the railroad in American life. By the mid-1890s, almost the entire North American transport network was oriented around the 200,000 miles of track extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and also connecting with substantial networks in the neighboring countries of Canada and Mexico.

By then, New York Central's Empire State Express had exceeded 100 miles per hour on its runs to Chicago, leaving no doubt about rail travel's potential for speed. As for comfort, Pullman cars of the day rivaled the finest hotels for the level of service and creature comforts provided. Railroads offered convenience, taking travelers across the continent in less than a week-or down branch lines to the most remote Appalachian hamlet in a matter of days.

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In the West, railroads helped open new territory to economic exploitation, and then played a large part in the creation of the first national parks. They also pioneered modern forms of hotels, resorts, and restaurants. As the nineteenth century ebbed, every aspect of society and culture was reflected in the railroad. When the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was legal, railroads in the South responded with "Jim Crow" cars having "separate, but equal," accommodations. There also were special Temperance Movement trains, as well as excursions promoting the vote for women.

Americans celebrated the railroad in song, literature, and art. The fledgling motion-picture industry turned its hand-cranked cameras on speeding trains because they were the most exciting things on wheels. Virtually every form of entertainment traveled by rail, from the latest popular magazines to touring circuses and New York theater companies.

By 1900, the people of Canada, Mexico, and the United States had settled a vast continent that the best minds of Thomas Jefferson's day thought would take a thousand years to occupy. Largely because of railroads, it took only a few decades.

The Transcontinental Railroad | Article

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On May 10, 1869, as the last spike was driven in the Utah desert, the blows were heard across the country. Telegraph wires wrapped around spike and sledgehammer transmitted the impact instantaneously east and west. In San Francisco and New York, wires had been connected to cannons facing outward across the ocean. When the signal from the spike came through, the cannons fired. The world was put on notice: the transcontinental railroad was completed and America was moving to the forefront of the world's stage.

The World Grew Smaller
One day later, the first transcontinental freight train rumbled out of California on its way to the east coast. It carried in its hold an emissary of the Asian markets: a shipment of Japanese teas. On May 15, though the road required hundreds of thousands of dollars in patchwork along its length, regular passenger service opened for business. Travelers could make the trip between San Francisco and New York in a week. No longer did passengers or cargo have to take the treacherous route across ocean and Panama that had killed railroad advocate Theodore Judah. The coasts were connected -- and the world as Americans knew it had grown smaller.

A Competing Canal
Railroad pioneer Asa Whitney had once dreamed an iron route would re-center the world toward America, making it a conduit of exchange between Asia and Europe. In this sense, his vision of the grand project remained unfulfilled. Just six months after the meeting at Promontory Summit, workers half the world away consummated their own monumental feat of engineering. Opened in November, 1869, Egypt's Suez Canal linked Asia and India to Europe by a single waterway, thus ensuring that exchange between the two regions would continue to circumvent American soil.

Surging Interstate Trade
However, the transformation achieved in intracontinental trade was substantial. Within ten years of its completion, the railroad shipped $50 million worth of freight coast to coast every year. Just as it opened the markets of the west coast and Asia to the east, it brought products of eastern industry to the growing populace beyond the Mississippi. The railroad ensured a production boom, as industry mined the vast resources of the middle and western continent for use in production. The railroad was America's first technology corridor.

Improved Public Discourse
As it encouraged the growth of American business, so too did it promote evolution of the nation's public discourse and intellectual life. Americans could travel across the length of the continent in a matter of days, and gaze upon their country in its entirety from the windows of their train cars. Conversations begun in the east ended in the west. Books written in San Francisco found homes on New York shelves just one week after their publication. The rails carried more than goods; they provided a conduit for ideas, a pathway for discourse. With the completion of its great railroad, America gave birth to a transcontinental culture. And the route further engendered another profound change in the American mind. Here was manifest destiny wrought in iron; here were two coasts united; here was an interior open to settlement. Distances shrank, but identification to land and fellow American grew in inverse proportion.

A Disaster for Native Americans
Not everyone would benefit from that transformation. The transcontinental railroad was not the beginning of white settlers' battles with Native Americans. Nor was it the final nail in the coffin. But it was an irrevocable marker of encroaching white society, that unstoppable force which would force Indians onto reservations within decades. By 1890, even the Powder River Valley — the rich hunting ground so hard won by red Cloud and the Oglala Sioux — would be lost. New treaties scattered the Indians to reservations and opened the last great Native American holding to the settlers so steadily branching outward from the iron road. And the buffalo herds upon which Indians depended had been nearly depleted. They were easy prey to sport-hunters brought to the plains by the carload. More disastrously, the railroad introduced the herds to American industrial production, for which they became one more resource to be mined en masse. Millions of buffalo fell to indiscriminate slaughter, their hides shipped back along the rails to the markets of the East.

A Web of Rails
The transcontinental railroad did not long remain the sole venue of travel through America's center. Lines spiderwebbed outward from its branch points, conveying north and south the settlers coming west to consume millions of acres of land. By 1900 a number of routes ran parallel — the Northern Pacific and Southern Pacific among them — reaching westward from Mississippi to the Pacific just like the pioneering road.