Railroad Construction Quotes

The Panama railroad had been built by Americans over a half century ago, with appalling loss of life

Without the Chinese, it would have been impossible to complete the Western portion of this great National Highway. [The Transcontinental Railroad]

All the arguments given for building the Trans-Continental Railroad at the time were plausible but turned out not to be true.

Said Indians, further expressly agree: ….That they will not attack any persons at home or traveling, nor molest or disturb any wagon trails, coaches, mules or cattle belonging to the people of the United States, or to persons friendly therewith. That will never capture or carry off from the settlements women or children. They will never kill or scalp white men, nor attempt to do them harm. They will not in future oppose the construction of railroads, wagon roads, mail stations, or other works of utility or necessity which may be ordered or permitted by the laws of the United States; but should such roads or other works be constructed on the lands of their reservation, the government, will pay the tribe whatever amount of damage may be assessed by three disinterested commissioners to be appointed by the President for that purpose, one of said commissioners to be a chief or head man of the tribe.

The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

I do not object to the construction of rail roads and canals.

For me, I've always been fascinated by tales of the Chinese railroad and the workers and the conditions of the workers who built the railroad.

The close relationship between railroad expansion and the genera development and prosperity of the country is nowhere brought more distinctly into relief than in connection with the construction of the Pacific railroads.

We shall yet place an iron belt from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a railroad from Halifax to Nootka Sound …

A transcontinental railroad will not be built in my lifetime, or my children’s lifetime, or their children’s lifetime.

The railroads were built at the expense of the destruction of agriculture.

When the scheme for the construction of a railroad from Baltimore to the waters of the Ohio River first began to take form, the United States had barely emerged from the Revolutionary period.

Oh, the Irish were building the railroads down through Mexico, through Chihuahua. They finished the railroads when they finished out in the West Coast, and they went down and put the trains into Mexico.

I come from a line of railroad men. My great-grandfather was a surveyor for the Burlington Railroad.

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell?divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and eveningApollo and the sweet Muses of the Light? You enterprised a railroad?you blasted its rocks away? And, now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.

Since the day that we first trod the soil of these valleys, have we received any assistance from our neighbors? No, we have not. We have built our homes, our cities, have made our farms, have dug our canals and water ditches, have subdued this barren country, have fed the stranger, have clothed the naked, have immigrated the poor from foreign lands, have placed them in a condition to make all comfortable and have made some rich. We have fed the Indians to the amount of thousands of dollars yearly, have clothed them in part, and have sustained several Indian wars, and now we have built thirty-seven miles of railroad. All this having been done, are our cities, our counties and the Territory in debt? No, not the first dollar.

My father was a logger. He cut timber and hauled it out of the woods and had a sawmill. They sawed it into lumber. And, you know, the mines needed things they call timbers and collars and so forth, and they used collars on the railroad track that they put the rails on. And he - that was his occupation, just a sawmill man and a logger.

A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.

It was only through the Government's help that anything this gargantuan in size could be accomplished, much as landing on the Moon. It was not rugged individualists who built the railroad, it was rugged corporations who formed and financed themselves as entities. It was the rugged federal government that came up with the federal loans, and the land grants, that enabled it to be built. Amid all the romance of building the railroad we tend to forget that it was one of the major industrial enterprises of its age.

Black men built the railroads, not blue eyes.

1st. That they will withdraw all opposition to the construction of the railroads now being built on the plains. 2nd. That they will permit the peaceful construction of any railroad not passing over their reservation as herein defined. 3rd. That they will not attack any persons at home, or travelling, nor molest or disturb any wagon trains, coaches, mules, or cattle belonging to the people of the United States, or to persons friendly therewith. 4th. They will never capture, or carry off from the settlements, white women or children. 5th. They will never kill or scalp white men, nor attempt to do them harm.

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress.

Canadian Railroad Trilogy is an extremely fine piece of songwriting.

We've seen those results in generations of Muslim immigrants - farmers and factory workers, helping to lay the railroads and build our cities, the Muslim innovators who helped build some of our highest skyscrapers and who helped unlock the secrets of our universe.

Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.