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Today is September13, 2026 Sunday.

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The World in 1869 the year the rails met

The two crews met at Promontory in Utah after laying 1,912 miles of track. A journey from New York to San Francisco that used to mean months at sea around South America now took about a week.

Life back then

Two railroads had been crawling toward each other for years. The Central Pacific pushed east out of Sacramento with a workforce that was mostly Chinese, blasting ledges into the Sierra Nevada and working through winters buried in snow. The Union Pacific came west from Omaha with Irish crews and men just out of the army. When the first transcontinental railroad was finished in May, a hundred dollars bought a seat in a plush car with a stove. Most passengers paid forty and sat on a wooden bench for the whole week. Six months later a channel through the Egyptian desert opened, and ships heading for India stopped sailing round Africa.

The year in 8 events

• 💰Feb 5 Two miners in Victoria, Australia dig up the Welcome Stranger, the largest gold nugget ever found.
• 🧪Mar 18 Dmitri Mendeleev presents his periodic table of the elements to a chemistry society in Russia.
• 🚂May 10 A golden spike joins the two halves of the American transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah.
• 🚣Aug 27 Oxford beats Harvard on the Thames in London, in the first international boat race.
• 👶Oct 2 Mohandas Gandhi is born in Porbandar, a small port on the west coast of India.
• 📰Nov 4 The first issue of the science magazine Nature is printed in London.
• 🚢Nov 17 The Suez Canal opens in Egypt. Ships bound for India no longer have to sail round Africa.
• 🗳️Dec 10 Wyoming Territory gives women the vote, the first place in the United States to do so.

Who Was in Charge?

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