In this episode of Code and Council, we look at the nineteenth-century railroad buildout as the first time the United States tried to build infrastructure on a national scale.

Using Empire Express by David Haward Bain as our primary source, we trace how an idea turned into a system—how belief became policy, policy became financing, and financing created momentum that was difficult to stop. Railroads weren’t just a transportation project. They were an early experiment in combining public support, private capital, and speculative expectations into a single national undertaking.

The episode follows the railroad from its earliest advocates, through congressional land grants and financial speculation, into the labor camps, mountain tunnels, and “Hell on Wheels” towns that absorbed the human cost of building at speed. It ends at the Golden Spike, examining how ceremony and memory simplified a complicated process and fixed the story of the railroad around its outcome rather than its methods.

This isn’t a celebration or a takedown. It’s an attempt to understand the structure that made the railroad possible—and the patterns it introduced. Many of the dynamics that first appeared here would return in later infrastructure projects and sector-wide bubbles, long after the rails were finished.

If you’re interested in how large systems get built, how speculation attaches itself to infrastructure, and how early choices shape long-term outcomes, this story is worth revisiting.

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